Mon père et sa mélancolie

The protagonist of the documentary is the director’s father, Chong Ren He, born in 1937 in Li Jiang, a rural Chinese village near the Tibetan border. He is a descendant of the Naxi, one of 56 Chinese minorities, with a population of 300,000. What makes the Naxi people unique is its ancient Dongba culture, preserved thanks to ancient pictograms that are the only ones still in use and have been designated ​“living fossils.” Under constant political pressure and assimilation into dominant Chinese culture, Chong still lives in the village where he was born, which is like an island in a sea of hordes of tourists. The film involves his son’s search to understand how an 82-year-old man managed to construct his own spiritual fortress in which he can live and preserve his ancestral culture, which is as fragile as it is valuable.