文革期间，作为知青“上山下乡”运动的参与者，我的母亲和外公被派往贵州省龙窝寨——一个地处偏远山区、属于全国最不发达地区之一的村庄。后来在80年代，我父母工作的工厂在“三线建设”遗留下来的产业重组与人口迁移过程中搬迁至湖南省会长沙。怀着让下一代获得更好教育与社会资源的期待，工人家庭也随之迁徙。尽管他们完成了城市化的转变，其生活条件已与仍留在贵州的兄弟姐妹产生了巨大的差异。

2017年，在举办完我奶奶的葬礼的两周后，我即将从北京启程前往巴黎。我问父亲——一个十五岁便离开家乡的人——他如何面对失去亲人的哀伤。他只是平静地回答我：“没什么怎么办，你是要去做大事的人，这才是最重要的。”

父亲的轨迹与我的轨迹仿佛彼此重叠。他十五岁离开村庄谋生；这个决定改变了他的命运，也让他错过了陪伴父亲走完人生最后一程的机会。我十四岁独自前往北京，进入中央美术学院附中；二十一岁时，我来到法国开始新的生活。我们的家族迁徙轨迹，也随着我抵达法国翻开了新篇章。每个人都在奔赴一个看似比出发之地更重要的目的地，而每个人终究也都要“离开”。

如何理解这种世代的循环？面对父亲所说的“千年万骨”，影片试图追问：一个人的生命如何被置于更漫长的集体历史中。


Witnesses to and participants in the Zhiqing Movement (the “educated youth sent down to the countryside”) during the Cultural Revolution (1950s–1970s), my mother and maternal grandfather were sent to the village of Longwo in Guizhou Province—a mountainous region among the least developed in China. Later, in the 1980s, the factory where my parents worked was relocated as part of the industrial restructurings inherited from the Third Front Movement*, a vast program of inland development and internal migration. The workers’ families eventually settled in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, in the hope that the next generation would gain access to better educational and social opportunities. While they became increasingly urbanized, their living conditions changed dramatically in contrast to those of their siblings who remained in Guizhou.

Two weeks after my grandmother’s funeral in 2017, on the eve of my departure from Beijing to Paris, I asked my father—who had left his village at the age of fifteen—how he was living through his grief. He simply replied: “Take care of your career. That’s what matters.”

My father’s trajectory and my own seemed to overlap. At fifteen, he left his village to make a living. This decision transformed the course of his life, but it also distanced him from the final days of his father. At fourteen, I left home alone for Beijing to attend the high school affiliated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts; at twenty-one, I left China to begin a new life in France. With me, this family trajectory entered a new chapter. Each of us pursues a destination that appears more important than the place we leave behind, and each of us must eventually depart in turn.

How do we inhabit this generational cycle? Confronting this ultimate limit—what my father calls qiān nián wàn gǔ (“a thousand ashes and ten thousand bones”), a Chinese expression referring to the inescapable horizon toward which every life moves—the film explores how an individual life becomes situated within a larger collective history.