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‘Always’ Review: Deming Chen’s Strikingly Confident Debut Plays Like a Long Visual Poem
The Chinese director's strikingly confident documentary 'Always' should establish him as a new and exciting voice in nonfiction filmmaking.
But the poetry is not limited to the protagonist’s words, which appear as intertitles throughout the film; it is also there in the images captured of him, his family, classmates and his small village and its people. This change of course allowed for the inclusion of the writing of Gong’s classmates, making a film more expansive as a bevy of adolescents find their voices and are influenced by the terrain and the economic hardship of their surroundings. The camera painstakingly takes in Gong’s surroundings: fields of crops, mountains half-hidden by fog, insects moving in soil, the faint dust of the stars at night.
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