First-time Chinese director Jing Yi can pinpoint the precise moment that led him to become a filmmaker. The 31-year-old was born and raised in a tiny village in the dry grasslands of China’s remote northeastern Xinjiang region, near the border with Khazakstan. Coming of age in one of China’s few multicultural communities far from the bustle of the country’s gleaming modern metropolises — the region is home to Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Uyghurs and numerous other ethnic groups — Yi’s early encounters with cinema were limited to the sanitized, mainstream fare broadcast on Chinese state TV.
As he was nearing the end of high school, though, a friend lent him a hard drive filled with downloaded movies, a cache packed with works from China’s masters — Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai and Hong Kong’s Johnnie To — but also foreign names that were completely unrecognizable to him: Emir Kusturica, Abbas Kiarostami, Terrence Malick, Satyajit Ray and others.
“A complete shock that changed how I see the world,” Yi says of the bewildering but exhilarating experience of diving into his friend’s vault of cinema classics. “I had no idea movies could be like this.”
The young stars of ‘The Botanist’
Yi soon left his village for university studies in Beijing. But like so many from China’s hinterlands who are transposed to the country’s fast-changing megalopolises, he grew homesick and longed for the quieter rhythms of his village and the vast natural vistas of Xinjiang. Wanting to express these feelings, he began experimenting with cameras and making DIY short films. His obsession with cinema grew, and he eventually pursued graduate studies at China’s prestigious Beijing Film Academy.
Li’s debut feature, The Botanist, premiering in the Berlin Film Festival’s Generation Kplus section this week, is perhaps exactly what one would hope for from a cinematic wunderkind of his unique background. An enigmatic and arresting work, shot through with beautiful imagery of Xinjiang’s grassy vastness, the film defies easy summary. It tells the story of Arsin, a lonely Kazakh boy who takes solace in plants and the traditional folk beliefs he learned from an uncle who has mysteriously gone missing. Arsin’s world is rattled by the arrival of Meiyu, a Han Chinese girl whose perky presence brings him comfort, companionship and a strange sense of wonder. Together, they explore the landscape and share unspoken intimacies, imagining their valley as an endless ocean. But one day, Arsin learns that Meiyu will be moving away to attend boarding school in Shanghai; and just like that, he’s left alone again to grapple with the modern changes that are gradually encroaching on his village’s fragile world.
During his time at the Beijing Film Academy, Yi won the support of Chinese art house star Bi Gan, whose Tarkovsky-esque feature Long Day’s Journey Into Night was a critical sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. Bi’s influence — along with Malick, Kiarostami and Ray’s — is evident in subtle ways throughout The Botanist. After seeing and admiring some of Yi’s shorts, Bi became something of a mentor to the young director, providing comments on The Botanist’s script and rough cut.
Today, Bi is effusive in his praise for Li’s debut, summing it up as both “simple and profound.” He explains: “Arsin and Meiyu are not just characters but coordinates of expression, their faces carrying both memory and distance. Yet, Li’s true protagonist is something greater: the layered distances of Xinjiang. His work subtly unfolds the temporal gap between tradition and modernity, the spatial divide between inland and coast, and the dreamlike spiritual space between reality and illusion.”
