General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Getting Home (落叶归根)

Getting Home (落叶归根, Luo ye gui gen) is a 2007 Chinese black-comedy road film directed by Zhang Yang, in which a migrant worker transports the corpse of his dead friend across China to bury him in his home village.¹ The title translates a Chinese proverb meaning "a falling leaf returns to its roots," the traditional expression for returning home at the end of life.¹ It stars the comedian Zhao Benshan, with Hong Qiwen, Song Dandan, Guo Degang, Hu Jun, Xia Yu, Guo Tao, Liao Fan, and Wu Ma in supporting roles.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	落叶归根 (Luo ye gui gen), a proverb meaning "falling leaves return to their roots"¹
Director and writers	Zhang Yang, co-written with Wang Yao¹
Release	January 25, 2007 (Hong Kong); screened at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 11, 2007³
Runtime and language	110 minutes, Mandarin¹
Basis	A 2005 news report of a migrant worker who carried a co-worker's corpse a long distance home for burial⁴
Major award	Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Panorama section, 2007 Berlin International Film Festival⁵
Box office	$1,715,268 gross worldwide¹

Spoilers

Story

The film follows two workers in their fifties, Zhao (Zhao Benshan) and Liu (Hong Qiwen). It opens when Liu dies unexpectedly after a night of drinking, and Zhao sets out to fulfill a promise to get his friend home, beginning an odyssey from Shenzhen toward Chongqing with the corpse on his back.⁶ To move the body on buses, Zhao puts sunglasses on it and passes it off as a drunken companion; he travels with only a small monetary stipend from their employer.⁷

The film is episodic, built from Zhao's encounters with a series of characters, some of whom help him and some of whom hinder him: a truck driver, a bus robber, a beekeeping couple, a restaurant owner, a hair-salon girl, a scavenger woman raising a son, and others.⁸ In the ending, after Zhao collapses from exhaustion, the body has been cremated by the time he wakes; he carries the ashes home only to find that his friend's village has been demolished.⁹

Origin and production

A true story. The film adapts a news event reported in early 2005: a Hunan migrant worker, Li Shaowei, and fellow villagers tried to carry a companion who had died away from home from Fujian back to Hunan, disguising the corpse as a drunk and then as a sick man, until police stopped them during a transfer through Guangzhou.⁴ The story generated heated national debate, with some readers seeing the deed as superstition and others applauding the man's commitment.¹⁰ Zhang Yang visited the worker's home in Hunan, and shifted the script's focus from the result of the journey to the process of the journey, which let him build a road movie around one protagonist meeting different people.⁴

The title. The film was first called Falling Leaves (落叶). Zhao Benshan, after reading the script, found the name too vague, and Zhang Yang took his advice and changed it to Luo ye gui gen.²

Casting. Zhang Yang said Zhao Benshan was his first choice for the lead, judging that his image fit the feel of a migrant worker; the two had not met before, but Zhao accepted, saying the part seemed written for him.² Apart from Zhao, who appears from beginning to end, the other actors play short parts of two or three days each, helping out as friends of the director.² Hong Qiwen, who plays the corpse, was cast because he led the director, cinematographer, and production designer to every shooting location; during the location scout Zhang Yang had him audition, and he then spent more than two months being carried on Zhao Benshan's back.² Filming ran from August 6 to November 6, 2006, in Kunming, Yunnan.¹¹

Reception and awards

The film premiered in mainland China in January 2007 and in Hong Kong on January 25, 2007, then screened in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival on February 11, 2007, where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.³^•⁵ It received five wins and seven nominations overall, including Golden Horse Award nominations for Best Feature Film and Best Leading Actor for Zhao Benshan, a Hong Kong Film Award nomination for Best Asian Film, and festival prizes at Vladivostok, Kerala (NETPAC Award), and the Pacific Meridian festival.⁵^•¹²

Its worldwide gross was $1,715,268.¹ Commentary noted that the box office was modest against the commercial blockbusters released at the same time, given how far the film's subject sits from the traditional New Year comedy.⁴ Reviewers praised Zhao Benshan's comic performance and the film's portrait of everyday life in provincial China; Variety called it "a feast of acting as well as an on-the-nose portrait of modern Chinese provincial life in all its absurdities."¹²

Themes

Chinese-language criticism reads the film as a story about belonging and roots. Each character Zhao meets is searching for a place to belong: the truck driver wants to stay with his love, the beekeepers want a quiet refuge, the salon girl misses her hometown at the sound of its accent, and the scavenger woman wants a real home for her child.⁴ The ending, in which the destination itself has been demolished under development and displacement, has been cited in scholarship on returnee narratives as an image of the migrant who arrives home to find it unrecognizable.¹³

The director

Zhang Yang was born in Beijing in 1967 and graduated from the Director's Department of the Central Theatre Academy in 1992. Getting Home, which debuted at Berlin, is his fifth feature, after Spicy Love Soup (1997), Shower (1999), Quitting (2001), and Sunflower (2004).¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2007 to 2008 › Released in 2007

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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