Xu Weihao

Yang Fan lives in Yanjiao, which is separated from Beijing by the White River, during the quarantine. Her routine is pretty simple, cooking, cleaning and trying to abide by the rules. Her husband on the other hand, seems to be entangled in a voyeuristic/masturbatory web, where a classic painting of a woman hanging on the wall of her bedroom plays a crucial role. The two of them have sex, but things become more complicated when Yang Fan also starts sleeping with the enigmatic waiter of a restaurant she frequents, who has the tendency to pee under a tree every night after he closes shop. Instead of fighting, the three embark on a threesome trip that soon starts involving other people.

Yang, a nurse with an unusually selective sense of smell, can tolerate only disinfectant and lemon—until she encounters the scent of Fang, a man in a vegetative state. As she imagines her way into his memories, guilt and forbidden desires, the boundaries between intimacy, projection and death begin to dissolve. Moving between waking life and dream, Aroma is a dark contemporary fairy tale about the body, desire, and love that refuses to disappear when the body does.

Dong Bin has opened a surfing shop by the sea where Xiao Fang started working. The young man, however, seems to be on the run from himself, not being able to move beyond his grief and guilt for an accident that took place when he was still in school. He spends his days doing nothing outside of working, essentially just waiting for time to pass, with no particular purpose. Things change when two individuals his age, Yuan Yong and Yang Fan, appear in the shop, searching for a surfing board not to surf, but to take photographs on. An initially aggravated Xiao Fang eventually becomes friends with them, and the three start hanging out, with their relationship finding its zenith on a night out that ends up in a rather eventful karaoke. It turns out that Yuan Yong is trying to escape his parents' arrangements and Yang Fan is looking for a future in a life that seems as vague as Xiao Fang's.

Although Dayao's farm is the only thing that matters to him - he lives there with his aging mother, Guei-Hua, and his wife - he travels to a nearby town with her every day to work. Pregnant, Tian-Tian insists on buying an apartment and raising their baby there, as the only way for them to escape poverty and for her to emancipate herself from men. When hundreds of tons of concrete fall on him at the construction site where he works, Dayao miraculously escapes... but loses his speech and his mind. He is now a five-year-old child.

Baiye is a small border town where trains run through each day, heading toward the other side. Now nearly deserted, silent and still, the town is a place people rarely return to once they leave. One day, a young woman arrives with ashes, on her way to visit a mother.