Self-Portrait: At 47 Km

In the summer and winter of 2010, Zhang Mengqi returns to the village of her ancestors, 47 kilometres from Suizhou in Hebei province. Her film is part of the “Folk Memory Project” designed to gather oral traditions. Yet under the veneer of the duty to remember, the highly personal harshness of her approach is soon revealed by the shaky framing and intercut sequences of a dance performance based on the same theme. A strange return: her father fled the village when he was twenty, the threeyear-old cousin fails to recognize her, the grandfather is all but deaf… Moreover, the elderly villagers are reluctant to talk about the 1958-60 famine. The Party has gradually made the “3-year-long natural disaster” a taboo subject. “We paid our debt to the USSR, our food was taken from us…” the grandfather lets out laconically. This historic taboo finds an echo in the family circle with the glaring absence of the parents’ generation: what meaning can a “self-portrait” have for the filmmaker in a place where everyone sees her as nothing more than her father’s daughter?