Goodbye, Crescent Moon 半个月亮不见了

at the bamboo green 在竹翠苑←


I Wish You Happy Moon Festival 祝你中秋节快乐


受难日 Fallen Day



letter from sand 沙的来信

at the bamboo green (2024)


digital - 12min


Xiaolu Wang’s AT THE BAMBOO GREEN (2024, 11 min), on the other hand, isn’t about absence but rather how much you can fit into one shot. In one continuous take from a cell phone, the filmmaker documents her visit to her grandmother’s grave in the Ningxia Hui Muslim Autonomous Region in China. Wang presents part of her car ride there, during which her family picks up an imam on the side of the road, and then the religious rituals they all perform at the site. This feels like a miniature compendium of what makes contemporary Chinese documentaries so compelling—the filmmaking is immediate and observant, and the framing is always interesting. The final two shorts in this program are also intensely focused in their sense of place but incorporate historical concerns as well.” - Ben Sachs
 A one-take recording of a family's visit to the bamboo green at the foot of the Helan Mountains.

Filmed and recorded in 
The Hui Cemetary in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of northwestern China with Mandarin Chinese and Ningxia dialect

Currently available on Criterion Channel as a part of Prismatic Ground Presents

also availabe as a part of The Film Studies Library collection at Harvard University.

Installation:

Regarding is curated in collaboration with Onion City programmers Nicky Ni and Elise Schierbeek, a one-day install at the street-facing gallery LEISURE.

Screenings:

2025 | Chicago Underground Film Festival
2025 | CAAM Fest | Centerpiece Shorts
2025 | Onion City Experimental Film Festival | Official Selection
2024 | Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival
​2024 | Mimesis Documentary Festival | Official Selection
2024 | Prismatic Ground | WAVE 3: PROGRAM 6 | Official Selection
2024 | Courtisane Festival | Efforts of Nature II | Official Selection

Reviews about the film


“

The site is pretty easy to find. So says the young woman who has been filming an outing to her grandmother’s grave. Along the way, she and her extended family happen upon an imam on the road. Smiling, he offers them his services, and in a long, unbroken shot, they drive him to the gravesite to chant. The route is orderly, the car new and softly beeping, the family plot well-tended, if a little dusty. But the journey is twistier than it first seems. The woman, the filmmaker, explains to the imam that she is from the United States. Later, she reveals that her grandmother once appeared to her in a dream. Each turn is another opportunity to lose one’s bearings, for time to slip past, for languages and customs to become strange. What might seem mundane becomes remarkable in its unlikeliness: a distant family reuniting at a leaf-strewn grave. —Genevieve Yue

A quiet act of remembrance rendered with radical simplicity. Shot in a single unbroken take at the foot of China’s Helan Mountains, this unadorned document captures a family visiting a bamboo grove, where landscape, lineage, and loss quietly converge. What emerges is less a film than a threshold: a meditation on ancestry, language, and the distances carried within diasporic return. Intimate, ghosted, and defiantly untranslated.” - CUFF 2025


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