La Rizière (Das Reisfeld)

“The Rice Paddy” is set in a village in southern China. The story is told by a 12-year-old girl named A Qiu who lives at the crossroads of tradition and the modern world. This touching psychological movie is filmed with villagers, non-professional actors, playing the characters and their own lives as farmers from generation to generation. Director Xiaoling Zhu is a native of this region and was struck by how this 12-year-old girl from the isolated village loved to study. She was already a “little intellectual”, and the first in her family to have learned to read and write. In the movie, A Qiu wants to become a writer because she loves legends, she loves to tell the stories she invents. Perhaps she feels the urgent need to record her culture and language, an unwritten language that could disappear.