Film explores father’s past in China’s rubber forests

Shen Zhongmin, a filmmaker from Shanghai, carried a rubber seed from southwestern China’s Yunnan province to the premiere of her debut feature, “Shanghai Daughter.”

The seed came from the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, where her late father worked on a state-run rubber farm as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement, a program that relocated urban youths to rural areas from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Shen’s father rarely discussed his decade on the farm, prompting her to travel to Xishuangbanna after his death to learn more about his life. Shen spent nearly ten years retracing her father’s steps, meeting people from his generation and observing changes to the landscape. She noticed that rubber plantations were replacing rainforest and that former workers’ dormitories were being demolished.

These observations, combined with media coverage of a migrating herd of Asian elephants, inspired her film. “Shanghai Daughter” blends fiction and documentary techniques, following a fictional woman named Ming as she seeks out her father’s former colleagues in Xishuangbanna. The film features real rubber tappers, villagers, and researchers, and examines how people grapple with memory when historical records are incomplete.

At the film’s Shanghai premiere, a dozen former “sent-down” youths, now in their 70s, attended and shared photographs from their time in Yunnan, reflecting on a generation whose stories are rarely told. Shen hopes her film offers a path toward empathy and renewal.