“Capturing the Poetic Essence of Childhood Innocence”: Deming Chen and Hansen Lin on Their CPH:DOX and Jeonju Winner ‘Always’

When does childhood end? This slippery question becomes the crux of Chinese filmmaker Deming Chen’s second feature documentary, Always. The film, which won the top prizes at CPH:DOX and Jeonju over the past two months, centers on an 8-year-old boy, Gong Youbin, and his family in a small village in southern China’s Hunan province.

Gong’s father lost an arm in an accident, shortly after which his mother left them when Gong was just a few months old. Living off the land is taxing and the family, including Gong’s two grandparents, is struggling. When officials come to interview potential recipients of a government subsidy, the Gong family members are confident that they will be chosen. Amidst these daily hardships, Gong and his classmates find refuge and release in poetry, instructed by their school teacher. Over a dozen of their poems punctuate the slow-paced film, appearing in gracefully calligraphic texts, as the audience witnesses Gong’s journey from childhood to adolescence. 

The two parts of the journey correspond with the film’s well-crafted two-part structure: the first filmed exquisitely in black and white in 4:3 aspect ratio with Chen directly asking Gong questions, while the second part is shot in widescreen in color with a more observational approach. While subtly tracing Gong’s loss of innocence, Chen skillfully brings out an intriguing dialectic between fate and agency through moments in which Gong’s family pins all their hope on him while lamenting the misfortunes they’ve suffered beyond their control. 

Before the film’s North American premiere at Hot Docs, Chen and Producer Hansen Lin shared with Documentary the feedback they received at different labs and forums, the selection of poems for their film, and the approach of prioritizing emotions, rather than logic, in crafting the story. Always (a 2023 IDA Supported Artist grantee) continues its festival run at DocsBarcelona. This interview has been conducted in Mandarin Chinese, translated into English, and edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: Deming, did you write poems as a kid? Or do you write now?

DEMING CHEN: As a kid, no. I liked to play. My favorite back then was playing on the swing because my hometown had a lot of bamboo. These days, I keep a small notebook and often write down some fragments. Read them with the rhythm of poetry, and they become poems; read them with the pace of prose, and they are simply brief diary entries. They are like scenes from a film without any surrounding context.

D: I’ve read from your interview in the press kit that you had similar childhood experiences as Gong Youbin. How did you find Gong and his family? Are you from the same village or province?

DC: It was really by chance. I came across poems shared on WeChat by an online friend whom I’d never met. At the time, I didn’t know they were written by kids; I was just struck by the raw, simple power of the poems. I asked who the author was and she told me they were students from her class. I was immediately intrigued because I wondered how such young children could write with such clarity and beauty. While on a work trip to Hunan province, I took the opportunity to visit the village and meet them. I’m also from Hunan, and I realized how much Gong’s life reminded me of my own childhood. After spending some time together, I knew he would be the focus of my film. 

D: Hansen, how did you meet Deming and learn about his project?

HANSEN LIN: A few years ago, we were both pitching at CCDF [CNEX Chinese Doc Forum] where we had different projects focusing on left-behind children. Deming showed some very gorgeous footage and I was like, “How can another person shoot such a similar rural China setting so differently?” Deming was not trying to do a traditional documentary and I sensed that. He had a lot of footage shot in the village but he’s not trying to focus on an individual or follow their story. All the criticism he got from the industry guests was that he had to choose a character and that the film should be a character-driven, three-act story. After CCDF, we had a really long video call to talk about ourselves, why we became filmmakers, and what we’re doing in our lives in New York and Beijing, instead of the film itself. 

D: The project went through a couple of pitching forums and workshops. Did you notice any differences in how it was received in and outside of China? 

HL: That’s a really good question. When we first heard back from all these pitching forums, we felt like it was a recognition of our work but then we learned that they actually have huge differences. When we pitched our film in Xining, China [at the FIRST International Film Festival], we gave their Documentary Lab our rough cut and they surprisingly said they think our film is completed. But both of us thought we were not there yet. 

International labs like dok.incubator and Docs by the Sea thought that we still had a lot of work to do. Specifically, they were talking about the emotions. Are we close to the character? Are we getting the true emotions behind the visuals? Do we feel close to the director? What we did at Docs by the Sea was to really take in and absorb the footage. Because all of Deming’s footage is gorgeous and that’s also very dangerous. You have to form the language and figure out how to present the footage. It was really hard for us to articulate because especially for this film we didn’t have any other film as a reference, any work to help or inspire us on how to tell the story. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese professionals, based on their understanding of the topic itself and the environment, they literally ask, “What is happening here?” They have their really straightforward point of view about how they understand the story. I think there’s a cultural gap there.

D: How were the poems that appear in the film selected?

DC: I never did a complete count, but I know there were around 200 poems that we could use. Many kids in the class were writing poems and for them it was like keeping a diary. Sometimes they’d even write several poems a day. When it came to selecting poems, at first I focused purely on their poetic and literary qualities. Later, with input from the editor and the broader production team, we had to take some and drop some. In the end, we selected the poems that best fit the overall rhythm of the film. 

HL: I asked Deming to compile all the poems into a Word document and we organized them with the editing process in mind, thinking carefully about what each poem represented, the emotions behind it, and why a particular poem should appear at a specific moment in the film. We also considered the chronological narrative—whether a poem should serve as a prologue, an epilogue, a transition, or a reflection. We put a lot of thought into the emotional and structural placement of each poem to serve Deming’s vision of capturing the poetic essence of childhood innocence.

D: The film comprises two parts shot in 2018 and 2023. Was this chronological structure necessitated by the pandemic? Or was it always the plan to have a time jump?

DC: I first started shooting in 2018 when Gong was 9 years old. I kept going there and shooting. But it’s difficult to balance work and life when making a documentary, so sometimes I had no choice but to stop filming and do other jobs to make a living. It had nothing to do with the pandemic; I didn’t consider this factor. The film doesn’t have any such background and there’s no information about the pandemic in it.

D: The two parts of the film are very distinct in their technical approaches, even in the way the poems are presented. Just as we witness Gong grow up in the film, do you think there was also growth or changes in your artistic methods or perspectives over the years?

DC: My perspective has definitely changed. The editing process for this film was quite difficult because it relied so much on your feelings. Later in the film after his grandfather passed away, there’s a scene where we see Gong’s face while he is burning something with a thick mist in the background. When I filmed that moment, I heard a voice inside me saying, “The film should end here.” His childhood was gone—disappeared. I felt like I could wrap up the filming right there. I’m not interested in what comes after he’s grown up. What I’m interested in is just that moment of disappearance. I can’t quite explain it, but it was just that instant. I find that moment so captivating. 

As for the poems in the second half being recited [rather than being presented as texts], I just think they’re so beautiful. When all the kids recite them out loud at the end, it’s like a collective farewell to the past, to their childhood.

HL: Our film doesn’t tell its story through logic; we focus on emotional continuity instead. In terms of editing, we used a sensitive and simple approach. There isn’t a clear structure; it’s more about emotions and how to keep them flowing. At those international workshops, I realized that people care more about how an individual relates to the world. That throws out a lot of the so-called cultural aspects. It becomes simpler, more accessible, and more universal. The individual or the character could be you or me or anyone else. Why is it this particular individual that we need to watch? 

D: The epilogue of the film is a poem in calligraphy that reads, “childhood is like a breeze, gently passing by / we have all grown up / and the poems are left behind in our memories.” It has neither a title nor an attribution. Did you write it yourself?

DC: Yes, I wrote that by hand. 

Amarsanaa Battulga is a Mongolian film critic and PhD student based in Nanjing and Ulaanbaatar. His writing has appeared in Cineuropa, Mekong Review, photogénie, among others.