This Boy’s Life: An Offering to the Future in Deming Chen’s Always

They say ‘Always” has never been here. / I argue, ‘Never’ is always the wind. /

This wind, where does it belong in time?

“Always / Never” –Xingjie Kang

A young boy gathers sheaves of dried stalks from his family’s small planting field, weaving the strands together to build himself a fortress, a vegetal womb that encloses him in his own private place. He crawls inside the structure through a hole that’s just wide enough to fit his body. With a small smile of satisfaction, he takes the last bundle to close it fast after squirming his way in feet first. Once inside, we hear director, Deming Chen, whose camera stays close on the boy’s face, ask a question: “Gong Youbin, do you miss your mother?” After pondering for several seconds with many indefinable emotions playing across his features, and then smiling again, the boy replies: “That’s worthy of consideration. I’ll answer you later.” He retreats further inside the dark of his fieldhouse.

This is one of only two times Chen directly addresses his young protagonist on camera. But throughout Chen’s film, Always, we sense a deep and abiding connection to Gong Youbin’s world during the last vestiges of his childhood. Even with an innate intelligence and glorious poetic voice and sensibility, Gong Youbin’s future options are limited since he comes from a poor family living in a rural mountain village in Sangzhi County above the city of Zhangjiajie in China’s Hunan Province. He lives with his grandparents and his father on a small subsistence farm. This mountainous area is known for its natural beauty (of which Chen does not miss a moment to photograph in stunning ways), including the Maoyan River and the Badagong Mountain National Nature Reserve. Deming Chen also comes from this province and might have had a very similar upbringing, a quiet boy with a burgeoning sense of creative flow, an artful gaze, a sharp observer of what surrounded him.

“Share: The sun pours light on the earth. / Then darkness came, riding its gilded boat, / to steal away the last twilight.”  –Gong Youbin

When the boy was very small, his father was injured in a work accident that took away half of his right arm. This was also the time when Gong Youbin’s mother left, never to return. Despite the handicap, the father instills a hardworking ethos and is strong and ambitious when it comes to the family farm’s future. The grandmother rules the roost – opinionated, outspoken, critical, and physically robust – she runs the household which also contains one cow, a dog, a cat, a gaggle of geese, and some pigs who have gone on a hunger strike. The sounds of the clanging bells on the cow and dog echo throughout the foggy mountain passes. In the rustic house, the boy is always bent over his workbooks, a diligent student. The family lives far from any amenities, including a hospital. But they have phones and get farm advice and other news from their devices and through the television from the capital of Beijing, reports about how people’s lives are improving and how everyone has the opportunity of somewhere spacious to live in the New China. As well, there are announcements from the county broadcaster, the “Village Voice”, which can be heard through loudspeakers planted like metal flowers onto the telephone poles. The New China is coming eventually where the Old China still resides, roads being paved through the mountains at a rapid rate, modernity as sure as anything coming to replace the new with the old, sounds of heavy machinery echoing across a landscape otherwise consisting of bird song, insect buzzes and chirps, and the wind soughing through the forest’s trees. It is the 70^th year of the People’s Republic of China’s founding in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and while the quality of life has changed for many, the film resides resolutely in a space of unambiguous need and constant lack of steady sustenance.

Chen offers up a moving meditation of the five years he filmed with Gong Youbin and his family, watching as childhood waned and adolescence waxed, each exquisitely composed frame holding still long enough to glean so much story without dreary exposition, lovingly constructed impressions of a life lived, in the process creating a rarefied, distilled cinematic work. The 32-year-old Chen began to develop his camera eye as a self-taught photographer in high school. In 2018, he went to study filmmaking at the Li Xianting Film School, the hub of Chinese independent cinema in Beijing, an institution that has had a very rocky road. In 2013, five years before Chen arrived there, the school was abruptly closed by authorities. More than twenty policemen came and forcibly transferred the teachers and students to a hotel in a district on the outskirts of Beijing. The next day, the students were sent home. But they and the alumni started a campaign on the Chinese social networking site Weibo to show their support. Li Xianting is an independent art critic and founder of the film school, and the Beijing Independent Film Festival is funded through his foundation. The festival, too, has faced official interference several times in recent years.

I mention this troubled history of an outside-the-margins cultural leader because, while Chen never really explicitly or literally explores the larger socio-political environment that surrounds his struggling protagonists, through his attention to the boy and the surrounding nature that is Gong Youbin’s playground, there is a sharp and constant focus on just how difficult it might be for this talented young voice to ever be able to live a life devoted to artmaking, no matter its form. Chen’s devotion, focus and commitment stay placed solely on the family, his lens always seeking out the purity of the landscape and the small wonders it holds amidst the boy’s deep loneliness, and not just for a mother gone missing. As well-intentioned and supportive as his family is, Gong Youbin is moving into uncharted territory, and it is a journey he’ll need to do solo.

After an opening shot in hues of soft cool blues like washed denim, most of the film shifts to monochrome greyscale. As the boy tries to figure out how to look through binoculars, Chen asks him, “What do you see?”, already in dialogue with him about his perceptions, both large and small. We then meet Gong Youbin in his poetry class, each student tasked with distilling complex thoughts and feelings into spare, yet powerful, odes to their own inner worlds. The first poem heard by Gong Youbin appears on the screen in both Chinese and English. “Ambiguity: Something is swirling in the pit of my heart. / In the sky’s bluish heart, / a word hasn’t found its mouth.”

As he gets a bit older, Gong Youbin becomes more and more attuned to the family conversations his father and grandparents hold around the dinner table, how to survive financially, what they should do in line with their “fate”, and the unpredictable vagaries of the marketplace. Yet the harsh realities discussed around the hearth are always mitigated by Chen’s stalwart focus, intense, patient and wondrous, as he films the nature around them. In one scene that goes on for a full two minutes, he macroscopically shoots a colony of ants lifting a dried-out husk of a dead moth; it seems to become re-animated by the efforts of the other insects as they collectively move it across the frame. The scene cuts to the three adults working together to shove a wheelbarrow of rocks and dirt up a small incline. Individually, they have nothing but their miniscule selves, but together they can do what needs to be done. Together they could move a mountain if they had to.

***

“Farewell: The weeds bid farewell to the river. / The trees, to the wind. / When I leave, / there’s no one to say goodbye. / I run on this flourishing earth. / Grass and blossoms nourish / my growing body / — a farewell to childhood.”   –Gong Youbin

In the last section of Always, color is re-introduced, a smoky dark yellow/orange across the fallow field bathed in fog, a figure in the far distance, small and insignificant. The poem overlaid onto the screen, written by one of Gong Youbin’s classmates, Xingjie Kang, might be one Gong Youbin has written to his mother from the protected barriers of his heart: “She and I Gazing at the Stars Together: I live on this side of the mountain, / she, on the other side. When we gaze at the night sky together, / we understand the words in each other’s hearts.” Apparently, his mother has tried to call several times throughout the years, but he had chosen not to answer. Perhaps this can describe his unarticulated response to Chen years before about whether he misses a mother he never knew, who chose something else besides him. The emotional impact of this revelation is in inverse proportion to the subtleties and silences of the boy’s affect, but Chen chooses to film the back of his head while his family discusses his mother. But this time, we can’t see what emotions, if any, are playing across the boy’s face. The fact that he is given this privacy speaks volumes as to how much Chen has come to care for and respect Gong Youbin.

The cool blue introduces itself again to conjure an early dawn, or thick fog, it’s just all hazy and dreamlike. The four-color palette returns as childish things are left behind. The boy continues to grow, working side by side with his grandfather and father in the fields, aware that he will be departing this “old” world very soon, to embark on his forward journey. The more modern sounds of the radio and the outside world intervene, the sound of planes flying overhead. The boy’s phone is his constant companion, replacing his animal friends – the dog, the cat, the little field mouse he captured when he was small. Between listening to modern pop songs on his phone – which he is increasingly mesmerized by – he is now a bit older, bigger, stronger, and more involved in the conversations about the farm, when to fertilize and plant. With playful affection, he arm-wrestles with his grandfather; he’s still not strong enough to best the old man. It occurs to me that there hasn’t been a poem shared in quite a while.

The film ends on a bittersweet note in a close-up on Gong Youbin’s face facing the oncoming wind as he rides down the mountainside towards another possible life, the film’s only tracking shot. Deming Chen and his core team – producer, Hansen Lin; editor, Ichu Lin; sound designer, Yannick Dauby (who also composed the original score and interpreted the music); and sound editor, Nigel Brown – have created a stunning and exquisite work of art that resides in the nonfiction realm, a lovingly composed and constructed rumination on the life of a poetic heart and soul, a small, but not insignificant time offered up within one boy’s life, in medias res. One long inheld breath. And then an outbreath filled with refreshment, solace, a bit of sadness. Most of all, there’s a quiet acknowledgement of the common thread that keeps us tethered, however tentatively, to life’s eternal song cycles.

 “Childhood is like a breeze, gently passing by. / We have all grown up. / And the poems are left behind in our memories.”

Pamela Cohn
©FIPRESCI 2025