Like a vast 19th-century landscape painting of farmers toiling under the sun, with hundreds of details evoking a world of strife, sorrow and occasional jubilation, director Huo Meng’s Living the Land ...

A cinema of ordinary life is also a cinema of culture. Amidst this chaotic ensemble, there is a boy — an anchor for this family in a myriad under-appreciated ways, as we will come to see. “Living the ...

A farming family in rural China gets a rich, warm portrait in Huo Meng’s picturesque second feature Living the Land, set in the early 1990s in a country on the cusp of vast change. Rather than a ...

There’s a patient, plainspoken poetry, neither overly earthy nor flowery, to “Living the Land,” a rolling rural drama that may be a work of pure fiction — but often feels wholly, organically observed, ...

Writer-director Huo Meng’s Berlin competition entry follows an extended family of farmers scraping by as their country gradually evolves into an industrial powerhouse. By Jordan Mintzer Like a vast ...