The First Line of China (2019) dir. Zhang Hanwen

Haunted by post-socialist nostalgia, 25-year-old director Hanwen Zhang returns to the cement-factory town in northeast China in which he was born and raised. The town’s official name is Sheep Pen Town, in the Shuangyang District of Changchun City, Jilin Province. People don’t really use this name, but currently refer to it as ‘the cement factory’. According to oral history, the town was known in the 1990s as ‘the first line of China’. Throughout the film, the director explores this clue to reveal a half-buried story. The town was a product of China’s rapid and radical industrialisation in the 1980s, having been constructed simultaneously with a state-owned cement factory to house the workers who migrated there. With a subtle irony and a nuanced but brave approach, Hanwen explores the history of his country and its ideology through the lenses of his own family and hometown.