For twenty-five years, the Far East Film Festival in Udine has shown its audiences the best popular cinema of the Far East, but it never fails to include art films as well. The 2022 edition's audiences particularly embraced this choice, awarding two prizes to the Chinese film Earth and Dust by Li Ruijun, which came from the Berlin Film Festival competition. In a festival that favors genre films, comedies, and expensive Asian blockbusters, this work won hearts precisely because it is delicate and moving. The film proved so beloved that Tucker Film, the distribution company linked to the festival, finally decided to bring it to Italian theaters.
Set in Gansu province, a rural area the Chinese government wants to modernize, Earth and Dust is first and foremost a love story—one that emerges unexpectedly between two people who have never known love. Youtie is a middle-aged bachelor farmer, a simple and humble man whom his relatives want to marry off. His family agrees with the family of Cao Guiying, a woman no longer young who has never found a husband because of an illness that has left her infertile, incontinent, and with difficulty walking. It seems the two families have decided to pair off their respective "discards." In the opening scene, both appear as spectators of their own lives, extras without will in a drama arranged by others, barely able to look at each other. Yet that is not quite the whole story. A secret exchange of glances allows them to study and understand each other without speaking.
Within this arranged marriage, an unexpected mutual understanding takes root: the couple, first through kindness and courtesy, gradually develops a moving and genuine affection for each other. Their life remains hard, of course. Work in the fields is grueling (though the woman helps her husband within her limits), and the couple has no place of their own—they must move constantly, dreaming of building a small house just for them. Youtie is also forced to donate blood regularly, as he is compatible with a local rich businessman who needs it. This supposed act of generosity becomes an imposition, revealing the context where peasants have few rights. But the director, with a participatory eye free from sentimentality (and from Western pity), also shows the intimate moments that cement their growing bond. The protagonists learn to strengthen each other, to overcome shame—especially she, who has always been judged harshly—and even to laugh. It is a story of two people trying to build something lasting: a relationship, a home, a future. Yet they must face the destructive forces surrounding them, forces that may be too powerful.
Li Ruijun's film offers no easy consolation (Chinese censors even imposed changes to the ending). Instead, it embraces all the good and evil of human destiny: as Cao Guiying learns from her husband through long scenes in the fields that reveal their admirable work ethic, nature has rules that cannot be bent.