Zhi

The title Paper is a reference to the expression ‘Life is as fragile as a piece of paper’. The story is set in a small village in South-Eastern China during the Cultural Revolution in the mid- seventies. A teenager is bored and spends most of his time hanging around in the street. An old man, a widower, earns his money making artistic paper shapes of people, animals, vehicles and other things. It is an old custom to burn these pieces of paper as a sacrifice to the dead, but in the years of the Cultural Revolution this was regarded as superstition and banned. The old man uses dazibao, propaganda posters, and secretly makes them into figures that should be burnt on his death. One day the teenager accompanies him to his house and finds out the old man’s secret. A bond ensues between the two. The boy finds out that the man once had a daughter, Qingqing, who was hit in the forties by a stray bullet. Since then he has always dreamt about the beauty of Qingqing. A sad film, filled with the dreams and hopes of the characters. With his clear, colourful and baroque style, Ding Jiancheng shows that he has a great eye for detail. Lines in cornfields form a moving, rolling, surreal painting and black & white shadows of trees evoke a poetic visual effect.