This is the ninth film of the “47 KM” series. In 2019, I spent my tenth winter in “47 KM” village. On one of the village’s hills, a new space is coming into being, from children’s paper drawings to the solid ground, from a fairytale to reality. Why did I name this film a fairytale? Why do we need fairy tales? In 2020, I started editing this film, it was a special year. It seems to me to be a reboot, a reconfirmation of the present and the future.
Zhang Mengqi was born in 1987. Since 2009, she has been a resident filmmaker and choreographer at Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing. A founding member of the Folk Memory Project. Mengqi has made nine feature-length documentaries filmed in her father’s village in Hebei Province, known as her “self-portrait series.” Her films have been selected by Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Visions du Réel, RIDM and more. Her latest film Self-Portrait: Sphinx in 47 KM Won the “White Goose Award” in DMZ International Documentary Film Festival. Her choreographic work was performed in Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis(France), ImPuls Tanz (Austria), Eurokaz (Croatia), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm(Germany)