Wang BingMrs. Fang , 2018
Winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno, Mrs. Fang is a stark, intimate meditation on death, memory, and the silence that surrounds both. Filmed in a small village in southern China, the documentary follows the final days of 67-year-old Fang Xiuying, who lies motionless in a narrow bed as family, friends, and neighbours drift in and out of the room chatting, weeping, comforting, waiting. Wang Bing’s camera lingers with haunting stillness on her face, her eyes wide open in a fixed gaze that seems to pierce time itself. Once a farmer and mother of two, Mrs. Fang has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for nearly a decade, and the film quietly raises the question of what remains when memory disappears. In Wang’s hands, dying becomes both an individual and communal act. One marked not by melodrama but by the quiet accumulation of gestures, glances, and pauses. Mrs. Fang does not offer answers, only presence: a document of life’s final threshold, captured with rare compassion and unflinching clarity.
