Gentle but lean Chinese arrival

In many ways, writer Jing Yi’s graceful and efficient drama, Botanist (Zhi wu xue jia), takes place as your typical movie about the upcoming age. It is a lonely child, who was raised by his grandmother in a small town, who falls in love with a neighboring girl. But as people begin to move to the big city, the child may be behind.

What distinguishes Jing from many other examples of the genre is its unique place, as well as an obsession with nature that is underlined by its title. Located in a stunning distant valley in north of China lying on the border with Kazakhstan, Botanist It shows an isolated community where the locals speak Kazakh instead of mandarin and where life goes as if modern technology never existed.

It is an intriguing background to a movie that can be too dreamy and underestimated to completely fascinate, but Jing is more interested in the atmosphere and visual splendor than permanent narration. Premiere on the Berlin generation sidebar, Botanist We could find places at other festivals with selected niche distributors, especially those catering children who are curious to discover an unprecedented world.

The movie opens like an old folk, and that tone pervades the rest of the narrative. We are seemingly in the present, where a boy named Arsin (Yesl Jahseleh) lives alone with his grandmother (Sarchet Eramazan) and spends his days in idle-is set up during a summer vacation-concept of plant specimens for his personal botanical collection.

But it’s hard to say when, exactly, the action takes place. There in the northern corner of the Xinjiang Province, life has not changed much in decades. When Arsin does not wander around the village, looking for rare flowers and puts them in a notebook, helps your older brother (Jalen Nurdaolet) to let the sheep into the surrounding hills. At night he lies quietly in bed – without an iPhone or Nintendo he does not exceed to stare – and carry surreal dreams. Sometimes he sleeps in the woods, to the point that it is difficult to say if it happens in what is happening Botanist It’s actually real or more like a waking sleep of a child.

This is obvious for a jing tone, using extremely assembled paintings (Li vanon, shooting your first features) to catch a world where nature often takes over -a -rolling horse shot that mysteriously appears in a classroom filled with plants – and where Life can be like a fairy tale, except when it suddenly makes real.

This happens whenever Arsin meets with Meiy (Ren Zihan), a Chinese girl talking about Mandarini who helps her family’s general trade, which provides the only connection between the community and the rest of China. Whenever Arsin stops at the store to buy supplies and make very subtle flirting, we hear radio shows on plans for bringing a natural gas mining into the region, which will no doubt transform the landscape forever.

Puppy love between Arsin and Meiyu is what drives the story, but there is not much except many quiet friendships and fast views. The more intriguing drawing includes Arsin’s brother, who we learned to have escaped in Beijing in manual work in Beijing after a violent quarrel. Now he got stuck home, passing time by sending his girlfriend in a big city, longing to separate from living in the village. At some point, we learn that Meiyu has the opportunity to escape, which would leave Arsin alone.

These developments do not move the narrative needle so much, and Botanist He feels more like a strange than a classic drama that happens, sometimes, trying to be. Jing has a sense of recording the beauty of a bucolic life, especially when you are still young like Arsin and the receptive embrace of nature (we earn that the boy has a missing uncle, who was also an amateur botanist). But the world of film can seem so essential – though attractive that – it often risks to pass through our fingers.