Agnis Shen Zhongmin’s debut feature, “Shanghai Daughter,” approaches China’s Down to the Countryside Movement through an unconventional lens, treating the southwestern rubber plantations where her late father was sent during the Cultural Revolution as what she calls “a geological theater that already contained all the information of the scripts.”
The film, which is in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, follows a Shanghai woman who journeys alone to a rubber plantation in southwest China, searching for a mysterious woman while strangers drift unexpectedly into her path. Starring Liang Cuishan alongside non-professional performers, the project deliberately blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary.
“I have never believed that there exists such a thing as pure fiction or pure reality,” Shen Zhongmin says. Her hybrid approach extended to treating her non-professional cast as creative collaborators rather than traditional actors. “To me, they were even my ‘screenwriters’ and my ‘on-site producers,’” she explains. “Not a single non-professional performer in the film ever received a so-called ‘script.’ They had no prior concept of what they were going to shoot or say.”
The director’s methodology emerged organically from her initial search for her father’s old farm residence, a process marked by uncertainty and improvisation due to limited archival materials. “This was never a project that began as a research-based or investigative endeavor; it arose purely from a very primal intuition and emotional impulse within me,” she says. That experience of drifting and searching directly shaped the film’s narrative structure.
Rather than treating the rubber plantations and forests as mere backdrops, Shen Zhongmin positions the natural environment as an active narrative force. “A rubber tree produces latex for only about 20 or 30 years, which is not so different from a person’s youth,” she observes. “On many levels, I feel that trees are like people — they have sensations, life cycles and the same impermanence of fate.”
The filmmaker’s approach to collaboration created what she describes as a kinship-based dynamic on set. Liang, the only professional actor in the cast, “possesses a natural, almost non-professional quality” with strong empathetic capacities that allowed her to blend seamlessly with the ensemble. “The state of the set truly was an overlap of real life and fictional creation — for example, after the camera cut, the food on the table could still be eaten, and the conversation could continue,” Shen Zhongmin says.
Coming to cinema from backgrounds in literature, journalism and contemporary art, the director views filmmaking as a particularly expansive medium. “Compared with these, cinema is perhaps more vast and complex, and also more ambiguous and multivalent,” she says. “It can borrow from, transform, and contain all the fields mentioned above.”
The film touches on themes of ecofeminism and social history without overt didacticism, favoring what Shen Zhongmin calls “a space for perception” over comprehensive explanation. “Sometimes, ambiguity may actually activate our senses and thinking more effectively,” she notes, adding, “I even think it’s perfectly fine if an audience member falls asleep in the cinema — because in sleep, our perception can still be stirred.”
About the film’s Berlin world premiere, she says: “This film carries both the cultural specificity of China and the universal dimensions of human experience. I hope this premiere in Berlin can serve as a window through which Chinese local filmmakers can convey new reflections on history and the present, as well as a form of subjective lived experience with international audiences.”
The cast also includes Zhu Yufei, Kong Chuanzhen and Li Xiuqiong. “Shanghai Daughter” is produced by Twelve Oaks Film Art. Parallax Films is handling international sales.
