General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Before the Flood (2005 film)

Before the Flood (淹没, Yan Mo) is a 2005 Chinese documentary directed by Li Yifan and Yan Yu that records the relocation and demolition of the old county town of Fengjie on the Yangtze River in 2002, before the town was submerged to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir.¹ The film observes residents, officials, church members, and laborers as a city that had stood for a thousand years is torn down and its people moved to newly built housing.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	淹没 (Yan Mo)²
Directors	Li Yifan and Yan Yu; cinematography by Yan Yu, sound by Zi Li¹
Production	Fan & Yu Documentary Studio, China; Mandarin language¹^•²
Runtime	Reported as 147 minutes (IDFA), 150 minutes (IMDb), and 143 minutes (Yamagata 2005 catalog)¹^•²^•³
Subject	The 2002 relocation and demolition of Fengjie before the first water storage of the Three Gorges Dam⁴
Awards	Wolfgang Staudte Prize (Berlin 2005), Grand Prize (Yamagata), Humanitarian Prize (Hong Kong), Best Documentary Feature (Lisbon)⁵
Release	Theatrical release 16 February 2005⁶

Spoilers

Content

The film records the whole process of relocating and destroying the old county town before the water level rose in 2002, to ensure the success of the first water storage of the Three Gorges reservoir.⁴ Its threads include:

An elderly volunteer soldier, a veteran of the Korean War, who runs an inn for hard laborers and fears losing his livelihood in the demolition.¹^•⁴
Members of a Christian church who must decide whether to demolish their sacred building, with church officials competing with each other for benefits from the relocation.¹^•⁴
Farmers facing the loss of land and livelihood through a housing lottery that assigns places in "New Fengjie," where many new homes are much smaller than the houses residents had built over a lifetime.¹^•⁴
Dockworkers salvaging what they can, and residents who do not know where they will stay even as the river approaches their homes.¹^•⁴

A British review noted that residents lucky in the housing lottery received a new but smaller and incomplete dwelling, or a sum of up to 500 yuan (about £35 at the time) in compensation for compulsory purchase, while others sold their old buildings to demolition contractors for scrap and foraged in the rubble.⁹ Within a couple of months Fengjie became a ghost town, its silence broken by sledgehammer gangs tearing down the last buildings.⁵^•⁹ The distributor's synopsis frames the film as showing "the contradiction between development and sacrifice," with conflicts with the authorities exposing what the IDFA synopsis calls the limits of Communist solidarity.⁴^•¹

Background: Fengjie and the Three Gorges Dam

The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is the world's largest dam and hydroelectric power station. Building it meant that an estimated 1.2 million people were made to leave their homes, according to the IDFA festival archive; a contemporary Danish documentary review put the figure at almost two million people facing permanent flooding of farmland, historical sites, and homes.¹^•⁷ Reservoir water storage began in 2003, with completion expected in 2009, by which time towns, villages, and cultural sites along the river would be underwater.²^•⁴

Fengjie, a port town that had benefited from its location on the Yangtze for a thousand years, had its turn in 2002. The town is known for classical poetry: famed Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Fu wrote poems about its beauty, and friends of the directors urged them to film "the capital of poetry."¹^•³^•⁷ In the directors' statement for the 2005 Yamagata catalog, they wrote that unable to find poetic beauty, they went instead to a church, where songs and poetry were being sung.³

Production

Co-director Yan Yu, speaking at a 2006 Tokyo screening hosted by the Yamagata festival, said filming began at the start of 2001, that shooting took one year and editing two years, and that the film was completed in July or August 2004.⁸ The film's North American distributor, Icarus Films, describes it as shot over the course of two years in a verité style.⁵ The directors placed themselves in the midst of residents' internal discussions, and the editing follows some characters chronologically over the eleven months before the flood.⁷

Reception and legacy

The film won the Wolfgang Staudte Award in the Youth Forum at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, its directors' first work, and was selected for the 2005 French Cinéma du Réel festival's International Competition.⁵^•¹⁰ It also won the Grand Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, the Humanitarian Prize at the Hong Kong Film Festival, and Best Documentary Feature at the Lisbon International Documentary Film Festival.⁵ Icarus Films states that it inspired Jia Zhangke's feature Still Life, which was also shot in Fengjie; Jia Zhangke additionally served on the Yamagata jury that year.⁵^•³

The film has been adopted for teaching in environmental studies, global development, and migration and urban studies, and is included in university library collections including Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Toronto, and Duke.⁴ It is distributed in North America by Icarus Films as part of the dGenerate Films collection, with a 2012 DVD release.⁵

Note on the title

The English title Before the Flood is shared with unrelated works, including a 2016 Leonardo DiCaprio climate documentary and a 2004 British documentary of the same name; the 2005 Chinese film is distinguished by its original title 淹没 (Yan Mo) and its directors.¹¹^•¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026