François Truffaut once said that everything begins in childhood. Chinese director Deming Chen approaches this with a gaze that is both deeply poetic and profoundly compassionate. In the villages of China’s Hunan province, where nature still dictates the rhythm of life and shapes the fate of its people, he offers in this documentary a melancholic reflection on childhood, one that slowly retreats in the face of the harsh onslaught of reality. Gong Youbin is a child being raised in the countryside, in a home that brings together three generations: his grandfather and grandmother, his father—left permanently disabled after losing an arm—and Gong himself. His mother has been absent since he was an infant, leaving behind a void that nothing can fill. At his village school, he learns to write poetry, using it as a small window into his inner world. Through it, he writes about vague emotions he cannot yet name.The director situates the camera deep in nature, letting it observe village life with quiet patience and gentle stillness. Mist drapes the mountains, insects move quietly through the soil, and soft light flows gently across the characters’ faces. The visual shift from color to black and white, then back to faded hues, subtly reflects the passage of time—the fading of innocence and the disappearance of childhood. Although the film documents specific years in Gong’s life (from nine to thirteen), it does not seek dramatic shifts. Instead, we witness a quiet unfolding of life as it passes by, accompanied by an ever-present sense that something is slowly coming to an end. There is a genuine dignity and warmth in the way everyone appears on screen; even those who complain never forget to laugh. They simply go on living. Even with the mother’s absence, the film does not seek answers. Perhaps she left because she could no longer bear life’s harshness, or perhaps for some other reason. It does not look for her, but it lets us feel the heavy weight of her absence. Hauvick Habéchian