A Good Town for Nothing

Name: A Good Town for Nothing
Start: 2025-09-19T18:30:00-05:00
Location: ACX Harper Theater (Chicago, IL)

Schedule

Fri, 19 Sep, 2025 at 06:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

ACX Harper Theater (Chicago, IL) | Chicago, IL

At the Bamboo Green
Dir. Xiaolu Wang | China/USA | 11 min | DCP | Cellphone | B&W | Mandarin w/ English subtitles
A quiet act of remembrance rendered with radical simplicity. Shot in a single unbroken take at the foot of China’s Helan Mountains, this unadorned document captures a family visiting a bamboo grove, where landscape, lineage, and loss quietly converge. What emerges is less a film than a threshold: a meditation on ancestry, language, and the distances carried within diasporic return. Intimate, ghosted, and defiantly untranslated.
A Good Town for Nothing
Dir. Yuchen Wang | China | 77 min | DCP | Chinese w/ English subtitles | US Premiere
One year after Shanghai’s lockdown lifts, Zhang Zhilü returns to his rural hometown of Quejiao Town to work as a driver. What begins as a quiet reunion with old friends and new acquaintances slowly reveals something more unsettling: a town haunted by silence, where every resident—Zhilü included—seems to be concealing a shared, unspoken unease.
Blending psychological portraiture with a dry, absurdist edge, A Good Town for Nothing is a melancholic and darkly funny meditation on post-pandemic dislocation and emotional drift. In Quejiao, avoidance becomes ritual: blame is deflected, confusion is masked by feng shui, and coping replaces connection.
Filmmaker Yuchen Wang crafts a subtly surreal and emotionally resonant story of a society attempting to rebuild—without ever admitting what was broken. In a town where even the name slips from “Qùejiao” (having a corner) to “Qūejiao” (lacking one), the film captures the psychological dissonance of people suspended between trauma and inertia, history and forgetting. A quietly devastating study in the absurdities of normalcy.