“You’ll see your father at New Year!” Yingying, Zhenzhen and Fenfen, the three young girls of the title are growing up like little savages with their grandfather in a house whose only evening lighting is a television set that is almost anachronistic in such surroundings. Smutty, windy, muddy, flea-infested… Wang Bing had already familiarised us with this pulverulent world in West of the Tracks. But in the Yunnan mountains, it is the beginnings of life and not the end of an era that are being recorded. Inevitably, these youngsters’ repetitive chores (collecting sheep dung, treading the pig feed…) remind us of the grimy side of the somewhat over-gilded medal of capitalist China. But the forcefulness of Wang Bing’s vision goes beyond an observation of squalor to become, as Arnaud Hée wrote for the Critikat site when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, “a science fiction of reality”. 1 CG
1 A. Hée, “Des humains avec des noms” at http://www.critikat.com, 11 September, 2012.
