Rocks Remember is a documentary that follows its author, Xiaolu Guo, on a journey weaving together narratives of underground tunnels and excavations, alongside personal recollections from inhabitants of the surrounding valleys, and traces left by transient visitors.
Xiaolu Guo is a British writer and filmmaker of Chinese descent. She published her first book at the age of 15, followed by collections of poetry and fiction. She gained recognition in 2004 with Village of Stone and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Doubleday, 2007). Guo has directed about a dozen films, including documentaries and feature films. Among her most notable works are She, a Chinese (winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2009 Locarno Film Festival) and We Went to Wonderland.
Her novels have been translated into 28 languages. Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017. In 2013, she was named in Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists, a list compiled once a decade. Guo was a judge for the 2019 Man Booker Prize and is currently a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at Columbia University in New York.
Through breathtaking images of the Locarno region, archival footage and performances, this documentary, produced for RSI by Vanni Bianconi in collaboration with Paride Dedini, invites us to reflect on the relationship between the deep time of minerals and that of an anthropocentric world. The author navigates between alienation and belonging, the sacred and the profane, realism and poetry, among the immovable rocks that never forget.
Rocks Remember © RSI 2022
