Oxhide

There is one scene in this film where the dad is explaining to his family about his own father’s cure for constipation. It involved a chopstick and a sugary mixture. Are you envisaging now what I was a few hours ago? Eye watering stuff and an example of the kind of conversational dialogue we follow from this family as they spend a few days together. The cast consists of the director (Jiayin Liu) and her real parents Huifen Jai (mum) and Zaiping Liu (dad) and they live in a tiny flat in Beijing - that might as well have been a cave; supplementing their meagre income by turning ox hides into luxury goods that people no longer really want unless they are discounted out of any semblance of profitability. They enjoy each other’s company sometimes, they bicker and squabble at other times but what is soon clear from this intimately shot feature is they have no idea how to escape the cycle of cramped poverty in which they live. For a while I was entertained, even intrigued, by their antics but quite swiftly I became less interested in this glacially paced docudrama. Aside from the fact that there is probably more natural light on the dark side of the moon, the photography lingers - or ought that to be languishes - for minutes at a time on shots that add little to the pace or depth of the story and as is always the case with these authentic styles of real-time films, they can be excruci…

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