TILL ASHES
TURN INTO PINES
Documentary as part of the Ripple Ripple Rippling film trilogy
Colour HD, 9mins., 2025
Co-Directed by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, and Mengfan Wang
Cinematography by Chen Zhan
Editing by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan
This short experimental documentary explores the inarticulacy of deep connections between matter, different life forms and humans.
Set in Shigushan, a marginal village shaped by the social-ecological tides of China’s rapid urbanisation, the film focuses on elderly women left behind while others form part of the 295-million rural migrant workforce in the city. These elderly women in the village—often widowed and living alone—tend pinewoods on family land for survival, thanks to the species’ low-maintenance nature. They gather falling pine needles for cooking fuel, trade sap for meagre income, and sell trunks to local factories producing pine veneer. Through timer products, they remain entangled in the material flows between the countryside and the city. Yet this forest-based livelihood is precarious—threatened by accidental fires, heavy snowfalls, and the relentless urban expansion.
TILL ASHES TURN INTO PINES, the final chapter of the RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING film trilogy, mediates on the bond between these elderly women and their pinewoods—a relationship woven through fragility, reciprocity, reincarnation, and transformation embedded in the textures of the everyday. Through a cinematic language that privileges juxtaposition over exposition and fragmentation over linearity, the film challenges the limits of representation—embracing affective resonance and multiplicity over coherent narrative closure. What emerges is not a singular voice or story, but a polyphonic space — where histories, landscapes, and lived experiences speak, however softly, for themselves.
Ripple Ripple Rippling