Living the Land

This special limited edition slipcover (designed by Brandon Schaefer) is limited to 500 units and is only available on our website and at select indie retailers. Absolutely no major retailers will be stocking them.

Founded in 2002 as one of the first-ever subscription film services with its DVD-of-the-Month Film Club, Film Movement is now a North American distributor of award-winning independent and foreign films based in New York City. In 2015, Film Movement launched the reissue label Film Movement Classics featuring new restorations released theatrically as well as on home video, with an emphasis on films by auteur directors such as Eric Rohmer, Peter Greenaway and Takeshi Kitano.

In the village of Bawangtai in 1991, time appears to have stood still. Despite the rapid industrialization happening in cities across China, everyday rural life for farming families in the Henan province remains steadfastly tied to the demands of the land. 10-year-old Xu Chuang, the third-born child of one such family, is unceremoniously left with his wheat farmer uncle when his parents and older siblings set out to find work in the Southern city of Shenzhen. Cared for though unable to shake the feeling he doesn’t belong with the extended Li family, Chuang finds comfort in a young aunt – who feels similarly uneasy as she is pressured to marry – and his surly but kind nonagenarian great-grandmother. Each season rolls into the next, and Chuang learns the quotidian rhythms of the land which they all till, at once bucolic, cruel, cyclical and nourishing.

The Silver Bear winner for Best Director at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, Chinese filmmaker Huo Meng’s elliptical and elegant sophomore feature proves “a cinema of patience is also a cinema of assurance” (Indiewire). Equal parts coming-of-age tale and epic portrait of provincial life, Living the Land exists at an apex for Chinese culture in the 1990s, “a time when major reforms were transforming China from a nation of rural laborers into the industrial powerhouse it is today” (The Hollywood Reporter).

• Region A Blu-ray
• Interview with director Huo Meng
• 16-page booklet with essay by film writer Hayley Scanlon
• English subtitles