Film Resources 

An unexpectedly compelling piece of "minimalism," Liu’s debut comprises just 23 fixed-angle shots of herself and her parents in their 50-square-metre home in Beijing. Her father Liu Zaiping makes and sells leather bags but is slowly going bankrupt; he has frequent arguments with his wife Jia Huifen and his daughter, generally over their "face-losing" suggestions for boosting business in the shop. All three of them are nervous and sleep badly. No solution to the problems is in sight. Liu sees a fundamental irony: her father works with ox-hides and is himself so thick-skinned that he’s impervious to ideas that could save his life and family.

Everything that appears on screen is transparently "true (and Liu confirms that it faithfully represents her domestic situation), but no-one would call this a "documentary." Everything from the choice of incidents to the composition and duration of the shots (not to mention the decision to frame those shots in ’Scope) is scrupulously considered and planned. It may not be fiction, but it’s definitely art. The tension between "reality" and artifice pushes the film into darker and more troubling psychological areas than cinéma-vérité has ever reached: Liu takes the film language of "realism" into an entirely new dimension.