Jiang Luo and his wife Guihua, a poor middle-aged couple with no children of their own, travel to Hubei province to adopt Xiao Ezi (‘Little Moth’), an 11-year-old girl whose mother has died and whose father, an unemployed drunk, is unable to look after her. Little Moth is affected by a disease brought on by toxic blood poisoning, and is unable to walk. In fact, Little Moth is handed over for a payment of $140, and we soon find out that her adoption is not motivated by love or compassion since Luo and Guihua intend to use her to beg on the city streets, on the basis that a sick or disabled child is more likely to make a strong purse appeal to passers-by than an able-bodied beggar. They try different begging pitches but are disturbed first by some thugs demanding protection money and then by Yang, a fellow child exploiter, who sees them as a threat to his income. Xiao Chun, the one-armed boy Yang uses to peddle [counterfeit?] money, persuades Little Moth to escape. First they go to a nearby district in search of a relative, but he has moved house. They then encounter Zhong, a rich woman who takes pity on the girl and takes her to a hospital, hoping that Little Moth’s disability can be cured and that unlike the boy Chun, she can be rebranded as a kind of humanitarian accessory to enhance Zhong’s public image. Meanwhile Guihua, moved both by belated maternal feelings and by guilt, is out on the streets looking for Little Moth. But she herself has been targeted by a ring of human organ traffickers directed by Yang and a woman doctor, and is about to fall into their trap.
Patrizia LIBERATI (Istituto di Cultura Italiana, Beijing) and Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
Based on a story by Bai Tianguang, this is director Peng Tao (The Cremator)'s second full-length feature film following his 2006 debut film Red Snow (hongse xue), a docu-drama set in rural Shanxi during the Cultural Revolution.
The DirectorSince his first student short film Story (2002), which won the Outstanding Short Film Award at the Beijing Student Film Festival in 2002, and his feature film debut Red Snow (2006), Peng Tao (b. Beijing, 1974) has been widely acclaimed as one of the most highly regarded younger directors of low-budget independent movies working in China today. His subsequent films, including Floating in Memory (2009) and The Cremator (2009), have been screened in many Asian and Western film festivals, including the Yokohama, Vancouver and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, and have won several major awards. Peng's films are notable for their use of non-professional actors, unmodified street locations and natural lighting, documentary-style camera work and above all their deep concern for the plight of some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged people left far behind in China's competitive scramble for wealth, status and power. Many of the protagonists of Peng's films lead precarious or blighted lives in a kind of twilight world outside the bright circle of modern Chinese urban society, and their stoic endurance and largely unheeded suffering appears in stark contrast to the materialistic fantasies, shallow sentiments and inauthentic or contrived experiences characteristic of much mainstream Chinese popular cinema in recent years.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London) and Patrizia LIBERATI (Istituto di Cultura Italiana, Beijing)
The story of Little Moth highlights a number of socio-medical problems endemic in China today, including the exploitation of children, the theft and sale of human organs, and the high incidence, especially among children, of chronic diseases probably caused by environmental pollution, like Little Moth's unidentified blood disease. In the course of her desperate but unavailing attempts to escape child poverty and exploitation, Little Moth and her adoptive parents encounter or fall into the clutches of a succession of shady characters, all realistically portrayed in documentary style: Yang the child exploiter and organ trafficker, his accomplice the female hospital doctor, the thugs threatening Luo for protection money, and Luo’s uncle, a local crime boss and murderer. In Peng’s film the lower rungs of China’s social ladder climb over each other in order to get ahead, and crooks prey on other crooks, with innocents caught up in the middle. People who at first appear to act from benevolent motives often turn out to be anything but altruistic, while petty crooks and hustlers may nevertheless show kindness and even self-sacrifice, but for the most part society at large and the public authorities do not seem to care, as the final minutes of the film powerfully convey. The characteristically downbeat finale is cinematically disciplined in the way that it ‘shows’ rather than ‘tells’, but the understatement simply serves to underline the wretchedness of Little Moth's predicament and the wider social ills which it signifies.
The film highlights the absence of any effective system of child protection or legal sanctions for those who seek to exploit children in various ways, as well as the inadequacy of legal and professional medical-ethical checks on the conduct of doctors. Many children without parents are in effect left to look after themselves, and in this context disabled children such as Little Moth and Xiao Chun are especially vulnerable.
Patrizia LIBERATI (Istituto di Cultura Italiana, Beijing) and Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
Little Moth is filmed throughout in an uncompromisingly direct, quasi-documentary style using mainly non-professional actors, unmodified street and other urban locations, natural or unmodified ambient lighting, fixed camera positions and long takes. The plot is not simple but the narrative style is plain and unvarnished, without any leaps backwards or forwards in time, complex psychological explorations or other artistic frills. The story is told predominantly from the childrens' point of view and the performance of the young Zhao Huihui in the title role is outstanding. The whole film has a grainy, raw look and feel and a slow, halting rhythm which lends itself well to portraying the wretched lives of the principal characters. It is relentlessly unsentimental and makes no concessions to the audience's need for reassurance and wish for a happy ending. Little Moth is in the best tradition of viewing China from the inside and from below that has been pioneered in independent documentaries and feature films.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London) and Patrizia LIBERATI (Istituto di Cultura Italiana, Beijing)
