Guo Jiawei

Cheng Xiaoyu's parents are divorced, and in the eyes of her classmates she is a problem teen. Influenced by her parents and oppressed by social reality, Cheng Xiaoyu neither believes in family affection, nor in friendship, nor in love. She gave up her pursuit of the future and indulged herself, often going to game venues, hotels, discotheques. Wearing famous brands, smoking, drinking, worshiping money, skipping classes, fighting, going to nightclubs, playing with men, and basically doing all the bad things that can be done when young, in the eyes of her and her sisters, their own responsibility is to give up responsibility. Pubescence is a 2011 Chinese teen sex comedy film directed and written by Guan Xiaojie, starring Zhao Yihuan and Wang Yi. It is the first film in the Pubescence theatrical series. The film was a box-office hit and spawned three direct sequels: Paradise Lost, Pubescence 3, and Pubescence 4.

A 15 part film featuring scenes from Xianghe, running from the mundane to the surreal: people parade in opera costumes, slaughter pigs in public and dine on the fields; they bury the dead and get married, tickling the bride and groom, everything done without speech. Sitting somewhere between intimate personal reels and detached ethnographic records, the work creates a simultaneous sense of immersion and distance – of the type you might associate with end-of-life flashbacks. Yang gives nostalgia a fantastic, mystical bent, as if to suggest that to revel in memory is a creative act.