Produced by prolific Dutch producer Pieter van Huystee and in its final stages of post-production, Louis Hothothot’s part-animated The Year of the Ghost, tells the intensely personal story of the director’s family following the death of his father in 2022.
Hothothot’s debut Four Journeys opened IDFA in 2021, but the pandemic was still raging, and when he returned to China he was forced to enter a 28-day period of quarantine. It was during this period that his father, the “shepherd” of the family, died. The director was not there to bid his father farewell, and nor was he allowed to attend the funeral.
His mother left Beijing to live in the village where her husband was buried so as to take care of his “gentle ghost.” This is a place populated by widows and children who are left behind by folk who must go to the big cities to earn a living.
Louis’s sister, meanwhile, is working from home as a matchmaker on a dating platform, helping strangers search for love while feeling increasingly abandoned herself. At the age of forty, feeling trapped “between the promises of modern China and the expectations imposed on unmarried women,” she takes a snap decision to marry a man she meets online, and to start a family of her own.
But for Louis, this creates a dilemma. Who will look after their mother now? Should he abandon the life he has created for himself as a successful, independent filmmaker in Europe? Or does he respond to the call of familial duty and stay in China to look after his mum? He says that the worrying situation left him drifting like “a wandering sheep.”
“This personal crisis made me look differently at the women around me: my mother, my older sister, my aunt and my girlfriend,” he stresses in his film notes. “Their lives reveal very different ideas about marriage, motherhood, independence, ageing and family duty. Through them, I began to see how intimately my own family history is connected to the social changes that have shaped modern China.”
“But the camera is also directed at myself. In my conflicts with my sister, I became aware of how deeply a male-dominated culture has shaped my own assumptions. I cannot question my family without questioning myself.”
The 52/95-minute film is very close to completion and was financed by the Netherlands Film Fund and NPO Fonds (NL). Mokum Film Distribution will release it locally and Dutch broadcaster on board is EO.
During NLWave, producer van Huystee was looking to secure a sales agent. “In a personal, intimate and cinematic style Louis tells the story over a period of 5 years,” he tells BDE. “The animation parts that visualize the past are astonishing and powerful.”
Director Hothothot further underlines: “As in Four Journeys, I use my own family as a way of understanding the society I come from. This time, however, I am not simply looking back. I have to decide where I belong, and what I owe my mother before it is too late.”
