Director Zhu Wen has always been interested in the choices of life: “When one choice of life is a fact, other choices become a dream. That’s a fact of life. I would like to tell a story about someone’s impossible life”.

Xu Daqin is a middle-aged widower and feels, that he has never lived for himself. When he was young, he wanted to go to Yunnan, a province near Tibet. Finally he gets to go there on a holiday and starts dreaming of, how his life could have been, if he had lived his life there. Trying to help a prostitute he gets arrested by the police. Feeling he has done nothing wrong, he refuses to pay a fine, and is placed under house arrest, but that doesn’t stop him from learning more about life in Yunnan.

Director Zhu Wen wanted to tell a story from his parents generation. How they lived through big changes with no complaints. He succeeds in telling a warm human story, where the kind and open protagonist makes you reflect on life and life’s real values. Not a big film, but a sweet little story, nicely told.

At this year’s (2004) film festival in Berlin it deservedly got the NETPAC Prize (Network for Promotion of Asian Films).

Uffe Stegmann
March 14, 2004

GALLERY