Director‘s Statement:
"Cangshan" is a place name that has disappeared. It is located in the south of Shandong Province. It was renamed from "Cangshan" county to "Lanling" county in 2014. This place is my hometown. For a person who has been wandering abroad for many years, when he returned to his hometown and was told that his hometown had changed its name, he felt very complicated at that moment. The town is still that town, but my hometown is no longer my hometown. A place is forgotten, a time is forgotten, a group of people is forgotten. How many people who want to forget but can't forget, embark on a journey to a foreign land, and how many people don't want to be forgotten, time flies, and their faces grow old. Whether it is active or passive, behind the "forgetting" I pay more attention to the struggle for "freedom". So what is freedom? Is it the separation from the past, or the calm face of reality, or the rebirth of desire. The movie "Cangshan" is a story of struggling between hometown and foreign country, past and future. A mother who escapes the present; an old man who forgets the past; a child who questions the future. A survival story of three grandparents and grandchildren in a foreign land, a difficult journey in pursuit of spiritual freedom. Borrowing a poem from my hometown poet Chen Shui: Butterflies emerging from their cocoons, It feels the force of the hurricane. The cocoon-like hometown has long been broken. The people of Butterfly are destined to find another changing valley.