General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

My People, My Homeland (我和我的家乡)

My People, My Homeland (我和我的家乡) is a 2020 Chinese anthology comedy-drama film made up of five short segments about life and change in rural China, released on 1 October 2020 for the National Day holiday under chief producer Zhang Yimou (张艺谋) and chief director Ning Hao (宁浩)¹^•². It is the sister piece to the 2019 National Day film My People, My Country (《我和我的祖国》) and the second entry in the "Me and My" National Day trilogy completed by My Country, My Parents in 2021³. The film led the 2020 National Day box office and finished its mainland run at 2.829 billion yuan¹.

Key fact	Detail
Release	1 October 2020, mainland China; 153 minutes, 2D, Mandarin¹
Structure	Five segments set in China's east, west, south, north, and center, covering rural health insurance, tourism, education, desert control, and poverty alleviation⁴
Creative leadership	Zhang Yimou chief producer, Ning Hao chief director, Zhang Yibai chief planner; segments directed by Ning Hao, Xu Zheng, Chen Sicheng, Yan Fei & Peng Damo, and Deng Chao & Yu Baimei²
National Day week gross	1.87 billion yuan, first place in the 2020 National Day slot⁵
Final mainland gross	2.829 billion yuan¹
Awards	Jury Special Award and Best Feature Film nomination at the 34th Golden Rooster Awards (2021)²
Audience ratings	Douban 7, Maoyan 9.1, IMDb 6.4⁶

Spoilers

The five segments

The film follows the collective-creation format of My People, My Country, replacing that film's seven historical moments with five fictional stories placed in five regions of China³^•⁷.

A Beijing Good Man (《北京好人》), directed by Ning Hao. Ge You reprises his role as Zhang Beijing, a security guard in Beijing who has saved for a car, then schemes to let his rural uncle, who needs surgery for a thyroid tumor, use his medical insurance card⁸.
A UFO Falls from the Sky (《天上掉下个UFO》), directed by Chen Sicheng. On Mid-Autumn night a mysterious UFO appears in Afu Village in Qiannan, Guizhou, 15 km from the FAST telescope, drawing television reporters to investigate; the mystery turns out to be a scheme to promote rural tourism⁶.
The Last Lesson (《最后一课》), directed by Xu Zheng. A retired village teacher, Old Fan (Fan Wei), suffers a stroke in Switzerland and loses his memory except for his 1992 teaching days in Wangxi Village; his grown students reconstruct that final lesson for him¹.
The Road Home (《回乡之路》), directed by Deng Chao and Yu Baimei. In the Mu Us Desert of Shaanxi, apple merchant Qiao Shulin (Deng Chao) seeks buyers to help his hometown prosper, clashing with e-commerce entrepreneur Yan Feiyan (Yan Ni) on the way to a school reunion⁶.
Ma Liang's Magic Brush (《神笔马亮》), directed by Yan Fei and Peng Damo. Painter Ma Liang (Shen Teng) gives up study at a top art school to take a poverty-alleviation post in his northeastern village, hiding it from his pregnant wife Qiu Xia (Ma Li) with the villagers' help¹.

The cast also includes Huang Bo, Wang Baoqiang, Liu Haoran, Wang Yanhui, and Zhang Zhanyi, among roughly a hundred performers⁹.

Production

Producer Zhang Miao (张苗) of Beijing Culture said the project began in the summer of 2019, responding to a call from the Publicity Department and the China Film Administration to record 2020, the final year of the targeted poverty-alleviation campaign, and that the team chose comedy as the genre best suited to the "welcoming a moderately prosperous society" theme¹⁰. The five directing teams each did field research in their regions; the actor Wei Xiang, a Sichuan native playing a northeastern village head, spent long periods observing in northeastern villages¹⁰.

The film was one of few completed through the COVID-19 pandemic from preparation to release. Ning Hao's A Beijing Good Man shoot began just as Beijing saw a small resurgence of cases¹⁰.

Box office and reception

The 2020 National Day holiday was the first major release window after China's cinemas reopened from pandemic closures, with 75 percent seating caps in place⁵. The eight-day holiday grossed 3.927 billion yuan nationwide, 87.92 percent of the previous year's total and the second-highest National Day gross in Chinese film history after 2019's 4.466 billion yuan¹¹. My People, My Homeland led the slot with 1.87 billion yuan over the holiday, about half the slot's total, ahead of Jiang Ziya and Leap⁵^•¹¹. By 15 October the cumulative total reached 2.2 billion yuan on more than 55 million admissions, and the final mainland gross was 2.829 billion yuan¹⁰^•¹.

Critics noted the film's use of flawed, ordinary protagonists rather than idealized heroes, and its consistent structure of comic buildup followed by an emotional turn¹². The China Film Critics Association chairman Rao Shuguang said the success of My People, My Country and My People, My Homeland had established a tribute-film brand¹³. At the 34th Golden Rooster Awards in 2021 the film won the Jury Special Award and was nominated for Best Feature Film².

The film began streaming on Chinese video platforms on 1 January 2021 with a limited-time free window¹⁴.

Place in the "Me and My" series

The three films My People, My Country (2019), My People, My Homeland (2020), and My Country, My Parents (2021) form a National Day trilogy using the same multi-director, multi-segment format³. Where the first film ran along a time axis through seven moments of the People's Republic's history, My People, My Homeland spreads its narrative across space, east to west, south to north and center, to show rural change¹⁵. Chief director Ning Hao described the film as "a letter written collectively by us filmmakers to our own hometowns and to everyone's hometowns"¹⁵.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026