The Other Side Of The Mountain: Review

Told largely through static, ambient shots occasionally decorated with personal anecdotes, director Yumeng He’s The Other Side of the Mountain is a slow, contemplative exploration of one man’s search for his childhood home. An attempt to grapple with a shifting landscape against memories of a bygone childhood home, the short documents the outcome of a rapidly transformative China – that is, a nation haunted by spectres of what has been left behind.

As the march of time trudges on, the vibrant greens of the countryside are polluted into murky greys of another pallid utilitarian cityscape; each crisp shot lingers unhurriedly, showing the well-trodden as well as the almost-forgotten. He meditates upon the question of how memory can prevail against a tide of change and emphasises the importance of oral folk history; an enlightening but officially unsanctioned chronicle of a community.

“Beneath the surface of fast development is fast forgetting”, states Yunmeng’s father, Cheng. And as he points out that very few of the locals were even born to see much of this great development, what they experience is through the memory of others – which begs the question: as the generations naturally age and die, and take with them their oft-undocumented memories, do these moments in time cease to exist? Is a secondhand memory merely a reimagining?

And though He falls short of outright pessimism, she apprehensively asks of this progress and all its consequences: at what cost?

By Joe Muldoon

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