ON THE MARGINS
Documentary as part of the Ripple Ripple Rippling film trilogy
Colour HD, Chinese with Eng-subtitle, 12mins., 2023
Co-directed and edited by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan
Special thanks to Yizhuo Gao and Yunshi Zhou for local filming support, and Laura Belinky for consultation.
This short documentary film offers a glimpse into an ordinary day in an ordinary village in China’s Hubei province. The villagers are a tiny grain within the country’s 295-million floating population. They are rural migrant workers—the driving force behind China’s unprecedented urbanisation—yet their stories are rarely told.
The families left behind in the village are often in a state of dissolving, with key members away working in the city. Their everyday lives unfold in a space of liminality—both socially and spatially. For them, boundaries do not separate but bind; thresholds are not merely passed through, but inhabited. They always sit on small chairs or stools at spatial thresholds—be it in their yard, at gates, outside convenience stores, or at street crossings within the village.
The ambiguity of the architectural space between the private and the public facilitates the villagers to push their bodies beyond the domestic realm, cultivating an elastic field of mutual support and relatedness. What emerges is a constant attentiveness to others—a readiness for negotiation, mediation, and association. Such practices are vital to forming resilient assemblages of social and economic security, grounded in intergenerational and cross-household dependency.
As architects using film as a medium for storytelling, we experiment with a series of time-based spatial collages that foreground the crucial role of thresholds in conditioning an intergenerational, interdependent way of living—somewhere between the familial and the collective. We call this the architectural reconstruction of filmic space and time.
ON THE MARGINS has received the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024), Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023) and a Special Mention at Arquiteturas Film Festival (2023).
Ripple Ripple Rippling