On August 28th, Chinese filmmaker Viv Li presented her latest short film, “A SOIL A CULTURE A RIVER A PEOPLE” (Original title: “YOU JIAN CHUI YAN”), to the audience of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. The 15-minute piece, competing for the Orizzonti Best Short Film Award, explores subtle yet pronounced elements of isolation, cultural difference and alienation, offering audiences a contemplative glimpse into both the past and the possible future.
Inspired by her earliest encounters with miniature replicas of famous landmarks at Beijing World Park, along with family stories from early 1990s Germany, Viv Li has created a haunting cinematic replica of Hannover. This chaotic yet nostalgic depiction of the German town offers Citizen Yu the only way to experience Western culture in a dystopian future where borders between countries are indefinitely closed. But can this echo of the past accurately reflect culture, politics, and above all humanity? How does Citizen Yu perceive society through this distorted yet tenderly poignant looking glass? Viv Li poses the questions; the answers lie somewhere between film and reality.
Shot on 16mm, “A SOIL A CULTURE A RIVER A PEOPLE” strikes a delicate balance between an extremely nostalgic vision of Hannover and an unsettling projection of the future, offering an imagery that is wildly vintage and undeniably contemporary at once. At its center, our protagonist, Citizen Yu, wanders the city, lost somewhere between memory and prophecy. Belgian cinematographer Grimm Vandekerckhove captures intricate emotions, colors, and nuances with profound perceptiveness. Through his lens, Hannover becomes alive, through Leon Weber’s haunting score, it lingers like a ghost. Musicians Tengal and Elvin Brandhi offer perhaps the film’s most tender and humanizing moment with a beautiful and bittersweet main theme, which in return lingers in memory, echoing long after the city fades from view.
Actor Zezhi Long embodies alienation, often without uttering a single word. Through his quiet and observant presence, silence is transformed into a language of its own, underscoring the dissonance of the main character adrift in a city overflowing with sound. As he walks the streets of this replica of Hannover, he is met with figures full of life and energy, anger and rage, facing cultural difference at its core. The cast - so incredibly fitting the vision of a Germany at the turbulent end of the 20th century - captures perfectly the raw atmosphere of a divided society, where encounters sway between hostility and fleeting moments of fragile connection. Each character he meets feels less like a scripted role and more like a fragment of lived experience, intensifying the heavy feeling of reality and film blurring into one. This eerie sensation is heightened by Thora Geißler and Lian Liu’s brilliant costume designs, who bring subculture, tender past and gruesome modernity to the screen with their faithful depiction of the style of the era, re-imagined to fit the visions of the future.
Viv Li enters a new chapter in her acclaimed filmmaking career, where issues about cultural identity and isolation are revisited, only this time through a more grim and terrifying magnifying glass. The director, known for blending sincere depictions of loneliness with touches of soft yet poignant humour, now approaches the subject entirely comedy-free. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the ever-growing fear of an isolated China haunts her film in its entirety, as boiling political tension and the rise of AI technology threaten to change the landscape of an already divided world. Is this all that is left? Is this truly the only way to experience culture and humanity - through a duplicate world full of nostalgia yet confined to a limited vision of what once was? Viv Li explores this jarring possibility with remarkable sensitivity, bridging the distinct memories and cultures of Eastern and Western civilizations in a poetic film that is as haunting as it is beautiful. The rest is history. Or is it perhaps the future?
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Viv Li is a Chinese filmmaker and artist based in Berlin. Born and raised in Beijing, Viv spent the past 15 years living in Europe, South America and Southeast Asia. She holds a master's degree in Documentary Directing from DocNomads and a bachelor’s degree with honour in Drama and Film Studies from the University of Manchester. Viv is a Berlinale Talents Alumni, Nipkow Fellow, a Sundance Grantee, an IDFA Alumni, and a Logan Fellow. She has participated in Locarno Residency, Chicken & Egg, Pop-up Residency and received the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. Her narrative short, ACROSS THE WATERS, was nominated for the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and won the Lights On Women’s Worth Award, presented by Elle Fanning. It was purchased by ARTE and supported by CNC. Her short documentary, I DON’T FEEL AT HOME ANYWHERE ANYMORE, was awarded a Jury Special Mention at IDFA among 8 international awards. Her most recent work, A SOIL A CULTURE A RIVER A PEOPLE, is competing for the Orizzonti Best Short Film Award at the 82nd Venice Film Festival. Currently, Viv is working on her debut feature supported by Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents and Chicken & Egg pictures, set to premiere in 2026.
Venice International Film Festival 2025 – Screenings
Thursday, September 4 – 11:15 Sala Giardino (Press/Industry)
Thursday, September 4 – 17:00 Sala Giardino (Public)
Friday, September 5 – 08:30 Astra 1 (Public & Press/Industry)