“Ritual without reverence is empty.”
In The Analects, Confucius says that without humanity, rituals are nothing but empty shells. The spirit is echoed in A Land With No Ceremony (Bichun Yang, 2024). This film departs from a violinist’s homecoming to her village in Hong Kong in 2020, when the world was just beginning to breathe again after lockdown. From there, the film moves and runs between the lines of nonfiction and fiction, attempting to capture a modern social atmosphere that feels more terrible than reality itself, a construction of a world where life goes on as usual, yet its pulse and meaning slowly fade beneath the hegemony of modernization.
The world, unfortunately, sets a price for mourning. Not only can’t afford to live, but also can’t afford to die. Cramped here and there to death. In China, the cost of the funeral is so heavy that the mourners can no longer mourn. The terms sibuqi and grave slave appear. Sibuqi means not being able to die properly, and grave slaves describe those who owe money for burying their families. In that context, Yang’s film becomes a quiet act of resistance against a system that keeps confusing value with measure, making meaning and ritual costly and excluded.
Behind all layers of power relations and stories, A Land With No Ceremony offers a quiet opposition to ceremony: daily life. Our daily lives are sacred enough to be ceremonialized. Through a rhythmic and unhurried tempo, this film provokes us to pay attention to and celebrate everyday life. It slows down the world, compelling us to witness the body as it labors, hesitates, and bears. The line between fiction and documentary is not just an aesthetic strategy, but rather a way to re-examine what is real and how meaning is reconstructed behind it.
Ceremony still exists, but it changes its shape: from procession to attention, from stuttering to simplicity in everyday life. There is no ceremony today because the ceremony has dissolved and is embodied in the practice of daily life, in the way we preserve and take care of our surroundings. (Hesty N. Tyas) (Ed. Vanis/Trans. Shafira Rahmasari)
Film Details
A Land With No Ceremony
Bichun Yang | 94 min | 2024 | China, Hong Kong
In Competition for International Feature-Length Documentary
Festival Film Dokumenter 2025
