Living Elsewhere

Living Elsewhere was screened at the Asian New Wave in October 1999 at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan. Wang Jianwei spent a year filming four farmers in a documentary style. The four farmers live in an unfinished villa, farming, raising pigs, and doing odd jobs, their lives unfolding in this almost surreal architecture.

In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, China, on both sides of a newly constructed highway leading to the airport, in a villa complex built in the early 1990s and shut down for nearly seven years, live four peasants who have come from different parts of the country to live on the fringes of the city. In this hollowed-out cave left behind by the bubble economy, these peasants are traditionally suffering from the loss of their farmland and the loss of their jobs, but they are also suffering from the loss of their farmland. On the one hand, these traditional peasants suffer from ‘unemployment’ caused by the loss of their farmland; on the other hand, they have to abandon their families and come to this completely unfamiliar space to rediscover their own place and start their new lives in a state of total isolation.