LE VEILLEUR

SYNOPSIS

Director’s statement

The current political and demographic context in China has a radical influence on education: from the earliest years, children are educated with the awareness of having to fulfill themselves on a social level.

In turn, parents invest in their child – the only possibility of a better future: it is a question of encouraging the child to develop what turns out to be his talent as soon as possible and to lead him to choose his path. A relationship based on sacrifice is established between parents and children: childhood, understood as the life of a man or a woman, disappears to the advantage of work.

Parents and children fuse together each other’s goals, they suffer social pressure together by putting their own lives aside.

Chinese education favors a system based on imitation and not on creativity.

I decided to do the portrait of Guandong in such a context – he, G, who became keeper of the Conservatory after his son, Z, was admitted. Their house is razed to the ground and no return is possible. Now, the two sleep three floors away from each other in the school dormitory.

With this film I try to weave the complex relationship that binds G and his son: they both love each other with unconditional love. But the word (in its intimate and private meaning) tends to disappear more and more, swept away by the social discourse that weighs on the father and son: Z must become the best in the class to be able to go abroad, the only door that could opening up a better future for him than his father’s.

Lou du Pontavice