May the Soil Be Everywhere

When filmmaker Yehui Zhao begins to film her grandmother, she embarks on an excavation of her family’s past and their long-lost ancestral village in the vast mountain range of Loess Plateau. She sets out to search for the story of her great-grandfather and in the process, discovers the land that generations before her cultivated alongside the cave dwellings that they called home. Here she pays tribute to her family’s heritage, bearing witness to their relationship with the land, labor and resilience. A shapeshifting and playful feature debut, the film is infused with performance, poetry and animation as Zhao constructs a living archive of oral history and community theatre. Summoning the past into the present, May the Soil Be Everywhere chronicles China’s history of war, famine and rapid urbanization through the lens of four generations in one family. (CT)