Between Hamburg and China

As a child, she did not perceive the fruit farm as unusual. Once a labour camp in the Chinese province of Sichuan, then a mixture of farm and prison - filmmaker Nana Xu lived here for the first ten years of her life, isolated from the rest of the country. When the school on the site was closed in the early 2000s, she had to move to a new town - and only now realises how different her surroundings were before. When people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always said a police officer. The only real profession she knew from the fruit farm.

Many years later, she returned to the fruit farm to shoot her graduation film "Guochang". At this time, Nana Xu had already been living in Germany for several years and was studying film at the HFBK Hamburg. Her entire family still lives in China.

She made her first research trip to the fruit farm in 2018, a long journey by bus over rivers and mountains, which also found its way into the finished film. The site has since been converted into a drug treatment centre and is now called "Grüne Heimat" - all traces of the former prison and re-education camp have been erased.

Once she arrives, it is difficult to find people she still knows from back then. Her family no longer lives here and many of the other residents have passed away or moved away. But before the project really gets going, it is already on hold again. The Covid pandemic has the world firmly in its grip - and travelling from Germany to China is impossible for the time being. Nana is only able to continue her project in 2022, travelling to Sichuan province again. "I didn't have much more than two weeks for the actual shoot, as I had to spend most of my trip in quarantine due to the Covid pandemic," says the filmmaker. With just her iPhone, a small BlackMagic camera and some additional equipment, she set off again to the fruit farm in search of traces of her past.

Through conversations with her father, who was sent to the labour camp in the 1970s as a counter-revolutionary for re-education and later became a fruit farmer, she was able to find one of her main protagonists: 91-year-old Gao Zijun, one of her father's best friends. He was still living on the premises during the filming. Xu's father, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was already living in a nursing home at the time. She visits the "Green Home" with Gao Zijun and talks to other residents. Nana Xu's mother can also be seen in the film, showing her daughter the place where the family home once stood. She hasn't lived here for a long time either.

The film is carried by Nana Xu's voice off-screen for almost the entire duration; she is only rarely seen on screen: "At the beginning, I thought about different narrative forms for the film. I would have preferred it if the eyewitnesses had spoken everything themselves. However, as I only had very limited material from my two weeks of filming, I had to think of a different way to put the mosaic of memories together," says the Hamburg native.

And the fact that her film was invited to the Berlinale Forum 2025, a small accolade so early in her career, shows that she was more than successful. After editing the film herself in around six months, everything was ready just in time for the Berlinale 2025. "I was sitting in a bar with a few fellow students when I received an email on my mobile phone from Barbara Wurm, the programme coordinator of the Berlinale Forum. I could hardly believe it - and slept even less at night," says the HFBK graduate and laughs. After the Berlinale, she will be travelling to China again in March, even if the orchard will probably not be on her travel list for the time being. But her father is. Because her next film project - an animated film - will deal with the fragmentary memories of his dementia. A film against forgetting, just like "Guochang".

Playing times Guochang/Obsthof:

20.02., 15:30 (Silent Green)

21.02., 16:15 (Arsenal 1)