Presented in collaboration with Green Ray.

Professor Chris Berry from King’s College London will deliver an in-person introduction before the screening.

This screening is part of SPRING QUARTET, a curated programme presented by Green Ray. Running from May to June, the programme features four Chinese contemporary independent films that respond to the motif of ‘spring’ from different dimensions: the restlessness of youth, the growth of life, the lightness of romance, and the drifting nature of farewell.

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Mothertongue is a film about loss and disappearance, language and memory, and the slow reconstruction of the self through the act of returning home. In this quietly intimate work, Chinese director Zhang Lü turns his gaze toward individuals drifting within cultural and emotional in-between spaces. After spending ten years in Beijing, theatre actor Fang Chunshu (Bai Baihe) returns to Chengdu following unexpected circumstances, only to discover an unfamiliar distance separating him from his hometown, his family, and even his former self.

Through calm, fluid observation, the film gently follows one man’s attempt to recover a fading sense of identity amid the uneasy process of homecoming. Fragmented conversations, hesitant language, and understated tenderness gradually accumulate into an emotional texture that feels both literary and deeply humane.

As the concluding movement of the quartet, Mothertongue does not end with dramatic catharsis, but instead leaves behind a quiet tension beneath its lucid rhythm and restrained surface. Like the final slow breeze of spring, it gathers the programme’s earlier currents — restlessness, growth, displacement, and longing — before letting them dissolve into silence, leaving questions of belonging and existence lingering long after the screen fades to black.