After a Woman Leaves Home, She Goes to an Organic Farm | Review of the Film Nei Sha

The film Nei Sha opens with a first unpacking of its title. On a reedbed in the depths of winter, Teacher Tang, the organic farm owner, explains to a visiting professor: this is the Yangtze River estuary, where flowing sand and silt settle over countless days and years, gradually forming the island. “Nei Sha” means a sandbar island within the estuary. Though never stated outright, it clearly points to the real Chongming Island, and Chongming Island is indeed scattered with organic farms.

The film’s narrative space gradually unfolds: at the end of the Yangtze, at the edge of the sea, cargo ships—emblems of globalisation—breathe in and out as they pass back and forth, while on this isolated island an organic farm struggles to survive. The margins of geographic space are compounded by the margins of the conceptual space of “organic”.

I. The Marginal Farm in a Marginal World

“The countryside” is the margin of the city. Films about the “three rural issues”—centred on rural space, agricultural labour and peasant subjects—have been endlessly reproduced in Chinese-language cinema, long since codified into a genre, and ever entangled in grand narratives of national destiny, cultural reflection and urban–rural development. Nei Sha continues this cinematic tradition, yet it turns its gaze upon “organic agriculture”—an agricultural model not yet coded into mainstream knowledge systems or everyday experience.

Organic agriculture is always faced with repetitive explanatory labour. Teacher Tang, the film’s male protagonist, like real-life organic farmers, must from the very opening explain to a visitor: “What is organic agriculture?”

Unlike industrialised agriculture, characterised by high inputs, high pollution and “high technology”, organic agriculture rejects chemical inputs such as pesticides and chemical fertilisers, emphasises ecological cycling and environmentally friendly practice, and concerns itself more deeply with ethical stance and lifestyle choices—through food and farming, moving humanity from exploitation of and alienation from nature towards cooperation and intimacy.

Within modernist narratives of development, industrialised agriculture is not only the dominant model in practice but also the orthodoxy of cognition and feeling. In China, after the upheavals of the modern era, “hunger” persists as a traumatic collective memory: “being full” is beyond question; and now, with the dual pressures of involution and economic decline, “eating well” has accordingly regressed. The various “morals” of organic agriculture can sometimes look “immoral”—an affront to the suffering endured by past generations and the class barriers that future ones will struggle to cross.

So although organic agriculture openly opposes industrialised agriculture, it has never been a match for its adversary. Facing state development policy and capital allocation logic dominated by industrialisation, organic agriculture has always existed as an alternative food system—a non-mainstream alternative food movement, a marginal zone of idealist practice.

In the film, the organic farm is a metaphorical space; rather than an idealist’s utopia, it is a heterotopia of survival in the interstices. There is no pastoral fantasy here. The many real-world predicaments an organic farm may encounter are gathered and juxtaposed, unfolding through a parallel structure of plot: shareholders parting ways, families drifting apart, consumer complaints, tense labour–management relations, land-lease disputes, an unreasonable certification system, insolvency, grassroots politics, the encroachment of capital—and, at the film’s end, a natural disaster.

And so, the foreseeable ending: the farm is ultimately sold, reclaimed by capital into the mainstream order. At the contract-signing meeting, a staff member accidentally plays a video shot by the female protagonist, Xiao Yu. Teacher Tang lets it run on. It is a compilation of staff interviews answering “What is an organic farm?”—the labour of explaining the concept repeated right to the story’s end.

Teacher Tang grows increasingly moved by their answers, laughing and crying. Were this a Hollywood success-narrative, this would be the turning point in the hero’s journey, the moment when the original mission is reawakened. Teacher Tang would abandon the sale, remember his founding purpose in practising organic agriculture, form a new “father–daughter alliance” with Xiao Yu, persevere and revive the farm, and arrive at a happy ending. But Teacher Tang is an anti-hero. He is always distilling or drinking; alcohol is his melancholic companion, his middle-age partner. He is an exhausted, failed idealist, and in the end he must become a realist who cuts his losses in time.

But the director does not rest on the failure narrative of an idealist middle-aged man. She steps deeper into the farm, and lets us enter the power structures and emotional textures of an organic farm.

II. The Marginal Women in a Marginal Farm

“Women” are the margin of “men”. Looking back at the very opening scene, as Teacher Tang speaks eloquently of his organic philosophy, a well-dressed male professor nods in agreement—one exclaiming, “Your research is truly profound,” the other deflecting, “I know only the barest smattering.” Meanwhile, a girl with a ponytail holds her phone to the side, somewhat flusteredly recording their conversation. My gaze inevitably fell upon that female character with no lines, her face indistinct. I could not but notice the scene’s staging: men declaiming and performing, women listening and taking notes.

As someone who works in ecological agriculture and rural development, I have already heard, in the real world, too many male-centred narratives around organic agriculture and young returnees to the countryside: the protagonist is always a man who once had a respectable education or career, who returned home for the sake of an ideal, founded an organic farm, but whom the villagers do not understand and his family does not support… After every manner of failure and setback, they still persevere. And so, either they find love and gain a wife, or they pay a price and lose one, or they yearn to build a family, calling out for a wife.

I had indeed braced myself for the possibility that this might be a story threaded with the professor’s survey of the organic farm, unfolding around Teacher Tang, the farm owner. Sure enough, within minutes we learn that Teacher Tang has been divorced—he has lost a wife. I have always respected individual practitioners of organic agriculture, but this narrative structure, I confess, has wearied me: women are always presented within sexual-romantic ties centred on men.

Once inside the farm space, a montage of fixed frames and long takes recreates the daily labour of the farm with a documentary’s patience and texture. The girl pushes her handcart into motion again, busy as ever. Her labour shots carry equal weight with those of Teacher Tang, the farm owner. In the background, she gradually comes into focus.

When the female protagonist, Xiao Yu, faces the camera directly for the first time in a frontal close-up, we finally see her face clearly and hear her voice distinctly. The professor asks, “Why did you come to the farm?” She answers, “I started as a volunteer. I just kept working and stayed.” Behind her, a small calf ambles past. The story’s ending is already rehearsed in that moment.

And so my perspective as a viewer shifted, from the attention and scrutiny one brings to an alternative food movement back to a gaze that, as a female audience member, I simply cannot avoid. When I met Xiao Yu’s eyes on the vast screen, I believe the director was looking back at me, too. The film’s concern is not merely to address organic agriculture, but to probe the margins within margins, interweaving the fate of a woman as an individual with the survival of an organic farm.

Teacher Tang’s perseverance is also entrapment; his body has never left the farm space. Xiao Yu, as the acting subject, threads the film from start to finish, moving between island and city, homeland and farm, dream and waking life. The audience follows in her footsteps through the film’s three movements: the first is the mother’s visit, the second the return home to honour the father, and the final act the return to the farm.

III. The Mother’s Intrusion

Unlike the professor, who descends “from the sky” bearing his acquisitive purpose, the entrance of Xiao Yu’s mother is slow. She transfers between buses and trains, carrying her body across the boundary of river and sandbar, while the girl rides her electric scooter along a river embankment with neither beginning nor end. Beyond the farm, on the island itself, mother and daughter reunite at a ferry crossing thick with liminal imagery.

The mother has brought her daughter red apples consecrated before the altar in a temple—tenderness laced with the scent of incense. She walks through the farm carrying a portable Buddhist sutra player, a bystander present yet apart, drawing out Xiao Yu’s labour and the farm’s operating realities.

The film was shot at a genuine working organic farm, and the rhythms of labour and the details of its scenes constitute for those of us in the real-world ecological farming community almost a collective, embodied memory. When the mother hangs her little Buddhist sutra player on the frame of a dragon fruit polytunnel, fellow growers in the ecological circle might see it and smile knowingly—vegetables raised to the sound of Buddhist sutras certainly have a school of farming philosophy— or frown and wonder: what is “natural” about a dragon fruit polytunnel, imported from Yunnan, running at such energy cost?

Just as an organic farm does not practise monoculture, Xiao Yu’s labour here is no single job. Besides filming videos, she feeds the cattle and shovels manure, teaches children in a food education class, sits in on farm meetings, soothes local villagers, and even delivers a contract to Teacher Tang’s ex-wife on his behalf.

● Above: an over-the-shoulder shot past the mother as Xiao Yu leads a food education class for children; below: a handheld shot as Xiao Yu steps forward to handle a land dispute and calm the villagers, while Teacher Tang remains in the car, phoning the village head.

● The mother is doing the laundry. Teacher Tang comes to the dormitory to confront an employee over a mistake in the meal preparation. The employee delivers a full-blown “post-90s workers putting the place in order” monologue, then storms out and resigns in fury.

The farm’s work and life are tangled together, impossible to separate into two neat categories. Xiao Yu shoulders physical labour, but also the emotional and care labour structurally assigned to women—she listens, mediates, reassures, and is forever “patching things up” across the farm’s cascading crises. But structural assignment also brings structural invisibility: Xiao Yu’s multiple forms of labour are never factored into institutional pay or decision-making. She has no wages and no vote.

At a three-way supper of mother, Xiao Yu and Teacher Tang, the mother and Teacher Tang sit face to face while Xiao Yu moves between them, seasoning dishes and serving food. Even the serene, Buddhist-leaning mother cannot resist, when her daughter steps away from the table, asking about her wages and her future.

The farm cannot meet payroll, and Teacher Tang resignedly decides, “Well, we’ll have to slaughter a cow, then.” Xiao Yu, who tends the cattle, asks hesitantly, “Could we please not slaughter the cow?” And on the day the cow is killed, Xiao Yu is sent to town to deliver documents to Teacher Tang’s ex-wife.

When Xiao Yu returns to the farm that evening, she stands in the cowshed with one cow gone; there is only her silent, restrained back. In the dining hall, a hot supper is in progress, and around the table sit Teacher Tang, the production manager, the professor, and the village head. The director has set a table, and through that table she re-enacts the complexity and flux of power relations.

The moment Xiao Yu sits down, she is urged to come and taste the beef, slaughtered fresh that day. Teacher Tang soothes her with his eyes and a gesture; she nods, showing a strangely apt, almost inappropriately proper “big-picture sense.” But she is truly heartbroken. Teacher Tang signals again and again for her to pour and drink, yet she sits there, meek and silent. Between drunken ramblings and genuine words, the village head declares his slogan: “We must make everyone remember the longing for home,” “We must build this place into a Beautiful Village.” Among the many predicaments the farm faces, a corner of the grassroots politics wrapped in Beautiful Village rhetoric is laid bare.

Xiao Yu goes out to buy more wine. The professor then rises to relieve himself; sloshed as he is, he refuses everyone’s offer to steady him and staggers off after her. This nearly triggers an instinctive wariness born of a collective female experience—we know what might happen. In the end, Xiao Yu shuts the professor, in his drunken ravings, inside the cowshed.

The professor’s incursion is in fact capital’s advance guard into the farm. The next day the cowshed gate hangs wide open, the professor has gone, and there are fewer cows. The farm’s collapse deepens: the cattle dwindle, some slaughtered, some having escaped. Before she leaves, Xiao Yu calmly completes the daily chores in the cowshed. She must accompany her mother on the journey home to honour her father.

● The mother, too, drifting between dream and waking, bursts into this night. Chasing the figure of her dead husband through a dream, she passes a parallel evening feast in waking life. In her gaze, Teacher Tang has come outside, a branch in hand—his solitude and loss rendered as a lit solo dance circling the bonfire. And her daughter Xiao Yu remains seated in the dining hall, surrounded by men in their cups, leaving behind a distant, small, silent back. Her grief is not named by the lens, but it can be recognised by one’s own kind.

IV. The Father’s Ghost and the Lost Homeland

Xiao Yu not only cares for the farm; she also turns that care back upon her mother. Though she bears no maternal office, she fulfils one nonetheless—the mother–daughter bond here is not a linear inheritance but an intersecting cycle of care. She brings her mother meals, dries her hair, drapes a shawl over her shoulders in the wind, and shades her eyes with sunglasses beneath the sun—through the intimacy of bodily gestures, she catches her mother’s wandering, unsettled self. In the family’s fracture—the father’s death, the mother’s retreat into seclusion—she carries out her own practice of repair.

The father’s ghost haunts without cease. “Your father has followed us all the way here,” the mother says. She has always spoken in dialect, and through the sound of the homeland she insists upon the homeland’s existence. Fixated on returning home to pay her respects, the mother hopes to complete the rite of deliverance for her father through the patriarchal lineage ethics of “leaves falling back to their roots.” Xiao Yu gently suggests: wherever we are, that is where we can make our offerings. Her care for her mother is not a repetition of the previous generation’s narrative but a rewriting rooted in the present. At the same time, she does not rewrite the mother; she chooses to understand and to stay.

●Above: the father’s death has built an inner cage around the mother.

The mother and daughter arrive at a home in a modern third-tier city. The eldest son has already formed a new modern nuclear family, and the two women are neither welcomed nor given a place to stay. With deep sympathy, the director stages a sister-in-law who has neither name nor surname: she prepares a bag of bedding for the pair, then carries out the eviction. The deceased father, the son who never appears—through their absence, they achieve a presence. They have come home, yet they are homeless.

That night, unable to check into a hotel without an ID card, mother and daughter enter an unfinished building. In the ruins of capitalism, amid the bubble of real estate, in this space of absolute indifference, they light a fire, share apples, and huddle in silence.

Uprooted from the countryside, they find the high-rises all look almost identical and nearly lose their way. Homeless, they are now homelandless too. Yet amid the soulless replication of rapid urban expansion, the mother, by the vague outline of a river, the silhouette of a tree, organically identifies the site of the old home.

In the shared courtyard of a housing estate, they burn joss paper to deliver the departed spirits. A security guard steps out and stops this private rite unfolding in a public space. The mother recognises him as a former neighbour, and an unprecedented fury erupts—curses pouring from her—because he once, under the label of “madwoman”, had her committed to a psychiatric hospital. He who once self-righteously defended the ethics of the traditional village community now guards the gate of a modern housing estate. Among the uniform blocks and identical apartments stands an atomised modern individual who can only defend a compound’s physical boundary.

The mother’s leaving was forced. With her husband’s death and the countryside’s transfor mation, she has been systematically, step by step, pushed to the margins of society; the temple has become a refuge for both her body and her spirit. She has lost her ID card, and with it an “identity” acknowledged by society.

Having faced homelessness and homelandlessness squarely, the mother tells Xiao Yu to set down the bag of bedding the sister-in-law gave them—a historical “burden”. She has completed this rite of deliverance and mourning.

V. The Power of N

After losing her homeland, Xiao Yu returns to the farm—her chosen “new homeland”. Teacher Tang is at the stove, distilling wine; she settles beside him, sharing a patch of warm firelight. As he steps away, she lifts his glass and drinks the mint water he has drunk from. That green—that same green once rendered in a close-up rich with sensory weight, resting on the table of Teacher Tang’s ex-wife—achieves an implicit intertextuality; emotions long deferred surface and flow back here. To Xiao Yu, Teacher Tang is both mentor and father. Yet her attachment and transference will keep meeting with rupture and disenchantment.

With one hand still cradling the mint water, her other picks up the farm transfer agreement Teacher Tang carelessly left behind. The truth, in a moment of vulnerability, lays itself bare. After losing her homeland, she is about to lose her new homeland too. Then a video arrives from the temple: the mother has undergone the tonsure ceremony and chosen to leave the world—she has lost her mother. “Loss” accumulates and stacks.

Xiao Yu begins to dream. Dreams are the signature the director has been practising. The mother’s dream is a haunting by the patriarchal ghost; in the end she achieves “leaving the world” through the very act of leaving the world—withdrawal from earthly life, a subjective renunciation of social structure. In Xiao Yu’s dream, however, she is an agent: she draws her bow and looks around, she runs after a car—yet the agent cannot yet fix her target; the aim remains suspended. The arrow that will not fly, the car that will not be caught—these are the accreted pressures of everyday life, an anger poised to release and a marathon of endurance. In the dream, Xiao Yu is performing a feminist strength training.

Gnawing into a crimson dragon fruit, burying a rotting apple—fruits blessed by the mother and by Buddhist sutras, now become the physical texture of pain and trauma. The boundary between dream and waking blurs; she is both in today’s farm and in the former homeland. In a dreamcore wander, Xiao Yu enacts a mourning for multiple losses—the recognition and grief of losing her homeland, her mother, and the farm. It is a ritual farewell.

In the end, the storm within Xiao Yu coincides with a natural disaster in the real world. Women and nature, under capitalist patriarchy, share one structure. In the dead of night a great gale rages and rouses Xiao Yu from her bed. She rushes to the polytunnel and rallies the workers to rescue the spring seedlings. Teacher Tang has vanished; his bedding is empty, with only a light scrap of paper left behind: “Let the heart be free; fear not the future.”

I really cannot help furrowing my brow. The boss gets to “let his heart be free” and tells his staff to “fear not the future”; the elder gets to “let his heart be free” and tells the young to “fear not the future”; the man gets to “let his heart be free” and tells women to “fear not the future”. This line has become the film’s main tagline, and like all Chinese philosophical expressions, it leaves infinite ambiguity and room for interpretation. My bewilderment is this: with what historical inheritance and what material conditions can we—how—”fear not the future”?

●Xiao Yu’s “sleepwalk” ends with nature’s upheaval.

The gale seems bent on toppling everything—polytunnels torn open, cowsheds collapsing. Beyond the frame of the film, climate change is indeed becoming a sword hanging ever overhead for ecological agriculture. The organic farm stands as a ruin of idealism beneath the twin disasters of market and nature. The unfinished building and the unfinished farm: the former is urbanisation’s void, the latter the collapse of a rural dream. Teacher Tang flees without a word. Xiao Yu, drifting between the twin ruins, generates a self amid ceaseless loss and fracture, and rises to stand once more.

She finds the farm’s last cow in the collapsed cowshed. One person, one cow—they walk into the reedbed on the sandbar. She gazes about and says to the cow, “Shall we just stay here?” Her “staying” is less a commitment to an organic farm with an uncertain future than a self-declaration: having lost everything, bereft of kin, roots, and homeland, she walks into the wild to build again. She will reclaim new ground and make something from nothing.

VI. Double Presence: The Self-Enactment of a Rural Construction Woman

Director Yang Yishu revealed at the post-screening Q&A that Xiao Yu’s performer, Zhang Dan, is a non-professional actor who herself is an intellectual woman engaged in rural construction—this is a rural construction woman’s self-enactment. Zhang Dan, too, had entered the farm (which doubles as the film set) a full month before the shoot began, immersing herself in on-site labour and daily life. The very design of the role is a life co-created by a female director and a female actor in concert, using light and shadow to perform a self-gaze and a self-telling.

The interview footage shown in the film was genuinely shot by Zhang Dan herself; her own subject perspective has been woven into the movie, breaking the boundary between in front of and behind the lens with her own body as medium. The workers answering questions are indeed real farm labourers, and perhaps more worth catching than their answers are the accents—some northern Jiangsu, some northern Anhui. Reality is peeled back to reveal yet another corner: the margin here is the edge of the Yangtze River estuary, the countryside within China’s economic heartland. Behind the avant-garde experiments in organic agriculture stretches a far broader and more complex spectrum of the three rural issues. Beneath the self-exploration of an intellectual woman, countless silent, still-undeveloped female figures await their reveal.

In the end, Nei Sha—like organic agriculture itself in relation to conventional farming—does not showcase the productivism of high-standard farmland and industrialised production. With an idiosyncratic auteur temperament, it responds to the alternative food movement and to women’s marginal experience. Nei Sha carries a smallholder’s temperament: soil-building composting, intensive cultivation, defending one’s auteur voice within an industrial system—mature yet clumsy, diligent yet unhurried. I feel fortunate that, in the crack between China’s Main-Melody blockbusters and Hollywood, such a viewing choice exists.

Foodthink Author

Zhang Xiaoshu

Graduated from Nanjing University of the Arts in 2016. Long-standing focus on ecological agriculture and rural construction through art. Sometimes films, sometimes writes; currently doing strength training.

Cinema Treat

Today, Nei Sha has officially opened on the National Art Cinema Alliance’s dedicated screening circuit. We welcome everyone to the cinema, and we invite you to share your understanding and reflections on the film in the comments below. We will select outstanding comments, and chosen readers will receive a free cinema treat (claim reimbursement from Foodthink with your ticket stub).

Director Yang Yishu is currently on a nationwide roadshow for Nei Sha. Everyone is welcome to come along and meet the director in person.

All images in this article are taken from the film’s official posters and trailer.

Editor: Yuyang