Sanlidong

A Portrait of Coal Miners in China

In 1955 more than three hundred impassioned youths traveled from Shanghai to the Sanlidong coal mine in Tongchuan, Shaanxi Province, with the hope of assisting with the building of China's northwest territory. Fifty years later, most of them are gone. In fifteen segments, this film documents the workers still living in the region, those who have passed, and a lost era of China's socialist industrialization.

"Lin Xin presents us with the historical destiny of a state-run coal mine across several decades, and with the memories of this abandoned mine's history among the miners who were cast aside. With minimal language, he imbues these memories with a sense of poetry and expresses his simple emotions with great structural clarity." -Ai Weiwei