A small-budget movie with an investment of less than 2 million - "Going by Boat", word of mouth is slowly fermenting.
It won the Best Screenplay of the Asian Newcomer Award at the Shanghai Film Festival, was shortlisted for the main competition of the FIRST Youth Film Festival, and was praised by media people for its "delicate images" and "Personal Best of the Year".
"Homeland" is a timeless and classic proposition in artistic expression. In recent years, more and more directors from Jiangsu and Zhejiang have launched excellent works, combining nostalgia with the scenery of the south, and telling the "Zhejiang Township Stories" with regional characteristics. Among them, "Going by Boat" filmed by young director Chen Xiaoyu further concretizes the sorrow and pathos of "Jiangnan Water Town" by focusing on an ordinary family that encounters an elderly person's illness and is about to die. Thanks to the meticulous and sincere production, in 2023, "Away by Boat" was shortlisted for the Asian Newcomer Unit of the Golden Goblet Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival and won the "Best Screenplay" award, and the film also won the Silk Road International Film Festival.
The story of "Away by Boat" is real and moving. As the title suggests, the "boat" is the most important image in the film, in the life of the water village represented by the grandmother, it has a practical effect, that is, to carry them to be born, married, and then to survive and live;
Although the characters in the story are burdened with a heavy past, the director's narration maintains restraint, and skillfully blends the past and the past, making the narration of "Gone by Boat" as calm and self-contained as a boat on still water. The careful preparation outside the story and the careful foreshadowing in the story make the film extremely tearful at several climaxes. Grandmother was troubled by the ventilator, and after hesitating in every possible way, she put it back on her mother; the voiceover reads her father's old letters, implicating the old man in the past; the family takes her grandmother on a boat trip, but her grandmother suddenly feels unwell when she listens to her brother's story about the past, and she can't calm down for a long time...... The love, hatred, and resentment that has lasted for a lifetime around the family have been condensed into several tragic moments at this moment.
But "Away by Boat" does not stop at the moment of mourning. With the returning boat as the head and the boat as the tail, this reciprocating cycle, compared with the grandmother of the fast food restaurant and the birthday child next door, makes the film transcend the simple two poles of sadness and joy, and achieve a transparent release of the cycle of life and death and the taste of life. Everything is like an oar rippling across the water, and then it is calm again.
The plot of "Going by Boat" is not complicated, but it is precisely because the concept of "boat" is so full that this image can find several precise landing points in the rich story layer, and it has also been delicately displayed. Grandmother Zhou Jin, eldest daughter Nianzhen, and youngest son Nianqing, they are all inextricably linked to this homeland. At the end of the story, the younger generations will finally say goodbye to their grandmother and look for their own ship in the flowing world.