Hometown 从上海到平遥 |88 min | Documentary | 2018 | with English Subtitles

Film Synopsis:
Set between Shanghai and Pingyao, Hometown从上海到平遥 follows Yu Zhuqing, a former textile worker who relocated inland during China’s Third Front Movement. Filmed over a year, the documentary captures her family’s moments of reunion, relocation, and return, revealing both warmth and quiet tension. Through a female and ethnographic lens, the film reimagines this history from the inside out, beyond slogans of sacrifice, toward the intimate emotions of displacement, aging, and belonging. In Yu’s enduring Shanghai dialect and her lifelong negotiation between two places, Hometown asks: what does it mean to arrive home after a lifetime of displacement?

Chaired by Prof Maria Jaschok, the event will include a post-screening discussion with Dr Jing Wang (University of Oxford China Centre) on women’s narratives, micro-history, and the affective politics of home and arriving home in contemporary Chinese documentary cinema.

Dr Jing Wang focuses on documentary studies, realist cinema, and visual anthropology. Dr Wang is currently completing her first monograph, Documentary in Fiction: Global Aesthetic Trends in Realistic Film During the Post–Cold War Era, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.