THIS BEGUILING FILM BEGAN LIFE AS A BRITISHCOMMISSIONED CHINESE DOCUMNENTARY ABOUT MOHE, A SMALL VILLAGE IN NORTHERN CHINA, LYING ON THE RUSSIAN BORDER.
However, when the crew reached Mohe, a supposedly mystical town where it’s light 20 hours out of the day and the aurora borealis sweeps across the sky, they discovered that it is nothing but a poor fishing village where people live just above the poverty line. Rather than abandon the film due to lack of footage, director Gou combined what she had filmed with a script written by a friend about a screenwriter searching for inspiration by travelling to Mohe. The result: a film that confidently occupies the shadow land between fiction and reality as Guo combines an innovative narrative with beautiful imagery and some gritty truths about modern China.

A guest at this year’s Dublin Writers Festival, Chinese author and director Xiaolu Guo will introduce this extraordinary mixture of documentary and fiction and afterwards answer questions from the audience.