.png)
In The Other Side of the Mountain, a filmmaker sets out to document her father’s return to his childhood home in Chongqing, fulfilling a wish from his aging mother. Fifty years after he last saw the city, the once-familiar streets and landmarks have been drastically reshaped by urbanization. Frustrated by the impossibility of reclaiming a vanished past, her father turns to his sketchbook, creating drawings that attempt to bridge memory and the present. We encounter former family friends and strangers who tell their personal connection with the transforming place. The film explores the relationship between the permanence of human longing and the impermanence of the landscapes we call home, and questions the reason behind different modes of documentation and image-making.
USA, China 2024, '20
DIRECTOR: Yumeng He
SCENARIO: Yumeng He
CAMERA: Yumeng He, Yuxuan Ethan Wu
MONTAGE: Yumeng He
MUSIC: Yumeng He, Dave Cerf
PRODUCERS: Yue Wu, Julie Gaynin
FESTIVALS & AWARDS:
IDFA (2024)
Big Sky DFF (2025)
Yumeng He
Yumeng He is a Chinese transdisciplinary artist and documentary director, cinematographer, and sound designer based in San Francisco and Berlin. Her background in anthropology informs her storytelling. She is passionate about telling stories that focus on identity, diaspora, memory, land, the interwoven personal and collective experience, and the human and more-than-human relationships. Her documentary works have been invited to screen at IDFA, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, NOWNESS Short Film Awards, and exhibited at the SFO Museum. She holds an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University, an MA and BA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California. She is currently a Meisterschülerin of Prof. Nina Fischer (Art and Media) at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).
