Always

The Chinese title of the film Always is Cong Lai, a phrase that carries multiple, ambiguous, and open-to-interpretation meanings: “always”, “coming from”, and “never have been”, depending on the context. With this intentional temporal and spatial ambiguity and fluidity, director Chen Deming creates a time–space continuum in which a moment is eternalised in cinema, and one’s origin becomes a crystal that one carries with them, always.

In a remote and sparsely populated mountainous area of Hunan Province, China, schoolchildren are encouraged by their teacher to write poetry as a form of free expression. They are given only key words to develop their poems freely, without restriction. Their verses, written with unadorned vocabulary and profound sincerity, appear on screen as part of the film’s narrative arc – punctuating time, defining rhythm, and setting the emotional beat. Gong Youbin, one of the many left-behind children in rural China, writes about the landscape around him, a vague sense of solitude, feelings of the past, imaginings of the future, and later his  own departure from the village. His coming-of-age, in fact, unfolds through poetry that endures in this beautiful yet isolated place.

In a meditative, immersive, and empathetic way, Always defies all conventions of films portraying rural China – without self-exoticisation and without the clichés of social-realist documentaries. The camera adopts an almost childlike gaze: explorative, curious, probing, and open to the unknown. No questions are asked; everything is observed with the innocence and wonder of a child’s curiosity. All-important words exist within the poetry itself. Most of the time, the camera is simply there with them: when Gong looks through binoculars, kneels before a simple chair to do his homework, falls asleep over his textbooks, and works on his grandparents’ land in solitude. There is a cinematic eye to moments of life as time flows by. It is thus moment-driven rather than event-driven – almost mirroring the way time passes and the way childhood is remembered. It captures a fluidity of moments, time in motion, or the remembered fragments that somehow connect and remain, the porosity of our perception.

With beautiful black-and-white images depicting childhood in the village, and coloured images marking adolescence, the film ends with a poem expressing Gong Youbin’s feelings as he leaves his village for secondary school in town. Then, the film tells us that Gong Youbin has long since become an adult and no longer writes poetry. Poetry, like childhood, becomes something left behind and forgotten when the pressures of adult life close in, and free associative imagination between words becomes a mere luxury.