Father and Sons

Ordinary Chinese people often have difficult everyday lives and since the masterful Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, this has been a thread in the work of the documentary maker Wang Bing. In Father and Sons he pursues his observational approach to the extreme, as if he is investigating the boundary between documentary and installation (as in his Crude Oil, which was also seen in Rotterdam).
With the exception of a few scenes, the camera never leaves the cramped dwelling that factory worker Cai shares with his two sons and that only has room for one bed and some shabby fittings. Long, uninterrupted shots stress the feeling of really stepping into the world where the youths divide their attention between their mobile phones and the noisy television, which is out of our field of view. Wang not only shows their living conditions but also the role of the media within them.
Shooting had to be stopped after the film crew received threats from Cai’s boss, according to the final credits.