The Best is Yet to Come

In 2003 Han Dong, a young man who has dropped out of high school, arrives in Beijing with the dream of becoming a journalist. Holding on in the city, getting into an editorial office and learning what reporting is all take time. The film does not tell this apprenticeship as a story of success; its subject is how a piece of news is built, whose words get on the record and what publishing costs. The account gives the Beijing of the early two thousands in real locations and never lets us forget that the young man has come from the provinces. The tension between the profession and the conscience is the knot of the story. Zhang Songwen appears in Wang Jing’s hundred and fourteen minute Chinese film, completed in 2023.