“The rice paddy” is a portrait of a village in southern China. The film follows a family through four seasons in the rice paddy. The story is told by a 12-year-old girl named A Qiu. When their grandmother dies, the children’s parents have to leave their jobs on a construction site in the city and come back to live in the village. A Qiu lives at the crossroads of tradition and the modern world. She has decided to become a writer when she grows up. The story is filmed with villagers, non-professional actors, playing the characters. This touching psychological fable is the first movie to be filmed entirely in the Dong language (a Tibeto-Burman language).
Xiaoling Zhu
Writer and director, Zhu Xiaoling, a French citizen, was born in southern China. She studied at the Beijing Film School (scenario department), while working at film studios in Guangxi. She directed a fiction TV movie for the Chinese television, before she moved to France in the ’90s. She worked as a writer, director and co-producer of documentaries and short films. She worked several years on writing and directing her first feature film, “The rice paddy”, a film she shot in the Dong ethnic minority region of Guangxi, the region of her childhood.