So Long, My Son

So Long, My Son (地久天长, 2019) is a sweeping Chinese family drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Wang Xiaoshuai follows two working-class couples across three decades of Chinese history — from the state factory towns of the 1980s through the upheaval of market reforms to the present.

Factory worker Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and his wife Liumei (Yong Mei) lose their only son under circumstances tied to China's one-child policy. The grief drives them away from their hometown and their oldest friends. They settle in the south under different circumstances, raise another child in near-silence, and carry the loss like something they agreed never to name. Wang Xiaoshuai tells the story in fractured chronology — jumping across years without warning — so the audience pieces together what happened the same way the characters have learned to live with not saying it aloud.

At the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival, Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei both took home the Silver Bear for acting — best actor and best actress at the same ceremony, which almost never happens. The film runs three hours and earns every one of them. Stream So Long, My Son (2019) online on iFILM.