Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

A documentary about Chinese literature. The film begins in a village. There is a literary gathering in Shanxi and the writers come to it. The structure is divided into eighteen sections, each with a title: food, love, illness, return and so on. The narrative proceeds through three writers. Each tells his own life, and what they tell also covers sixty years of the country: the years of famine, collective farming, the cultural revolution, migration from the countryside to the cities and the present generation. One writer describes his father's arrival in the village. Another describes a period of illness and how he began to write. The third describes his own village and leaving it. Between them are passages of villagers: people working in the fields, weddings, the preparation of food and a school. Those images neither confirm nor contradict what the writers say; they stand beside it. What the film is interested in is not the history of literature but the telling of stories itself: who tells, what they remember and what they leave out. A young woman reads between the sections and the texts appear on screen. Jia Zhangke directed. It was shown at the Berlin Film Festival. A rich source for anyone interested in documentary and the recent history of China. For a viewer waiting for events, the film is built entirely on talk and landscape.