General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Oxhide (牛皮)

Oxhide (牛皮; also romanized Niu pi) is a 2005 Chinese independent feature film directed, written, shot, and co-starring Liu Jiayin (刘伽茵), who filmed herself and her parents in their small Beijing apartment as a fictionalized family whose handmade leather business is sliding toward bankruptcy. Made while Liu was still a screenwriting student at the Beijing Film Academy, the film consists of 23 fixed shots, runs 110 minutes, and won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Caligari Film Award at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and cast	Liu Jiayin directs, writes, photographs, and acts alongside her parents, Liu Zaiping (father) and Jia Huifen (mother)¹
Form	23 static, one-scene shots; 110 minutes; shot on a small DV camera with an anamorphic lens in Cinemascope framing²^•¹
Setting	The family's roughly 50-square-meter Beijing apartment, filmed over 40 days¹
Story	A family of three survives on the father's failing handmade leather-bag shop while debt collectors loom and a discount sale divides the household⁴
Berlinale 2005	Forum of New Cinema; FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize and Caligari Film Award³^•⁵
Other awards	Golden DV Award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival; Dragons and Tigers Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival¹
Sequel	Oxhide II (2009), nine shots over 132 minutes of the family making dumplings, selected for Directors' Fortnight at Cannes⁶

Spoilers

Story

The film follows a family of three in Beijing who live on the father's handmade leather-goods shop and the mother's factory work designing and making leather bags. The shop does poorly, creditors arrive unannounced, and the father decides to sell the stock at half price. The discount helps at first, then stops working; the mother blames his management, and the father, eloquent everywhere else, is left slapping his own face in frustration. For the father, discounting means losing dignity, but without discounting the household cannot get by.⁴^•⁵

Around this economic pressure the film arranges small domestic episodes: the father trying every method to make his daughter grow taller, mother and daughter applauding a good day's takings, the daughter modeling a new bag in a narrow corridor, the family sharing one bed through sleepless nights.⁵^•³ The title refers to ox hide, the material of the family's trade; in one scene the father cuts a piece of hide scratched by the family cat, and in dialogue he observes that whip scars on an ox hide do not simply disappear.¹⁰^•¹¹

Production

Liu Jiayin was born in Beijing in 1981 and studied in the screenwriting department of the Beijing Film Academy, taking a bachelor's degree in 2003 and a master's degree in 2006 before joining the faculty.⁷ She made Oxhide as her graduation-era debut, financing it herself, with no crew: she handled direction, script, cinematography, sound, and editing, and the only performers were herself, her father Liu Zaiping, and her mother Jia Huifen.⁸^•⁹ Because her parents had to work and she had to study, the shooting was scheduled around daily life; the first scene was filmed in March 2004, and nearly all scenes were shot from midnight into the early morning.⁸

The film was shot in forty days inside the family's roughly 50-square-meter apartment using a small digital camera fitted with an anamorphic lens, giving widescreen compositions that crop top and bottom to hold the three bodies in claustrophobic close-up.¹ Although the material looks like documentary, the dialogues were not improvised: Liu planned all 23 fixed shots in advance and rehearsed the action in detail.¹^•⁴ Liu herself has argued that the fiction-documentary distinction cannot be settled by how real a finished film looks, and that some films deliberately occupy the space between the two categories.⁵

Style and reception

The film's radical economy of means drew attention at the Berlinale Forum, a section that explicitly welcomes works pushing the limits of the medium; the FIPRESCI jury singled out Oxhide among the few films there that actually did so.² Critics placed it alongside the work of Abbas Kiarostami, whose Ten (2002) Liu cites as her primary influence, and noted how it combines the raw sentiment of neo-realism with a deliberately alienating visual style of fixed frames, close-ups, and off-screen space.¹⁰^•¹² The critic Shelly Kraicer, a Canada-based specialist in Chinese cinema, called it "the most important Chinese film of the past several years and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country," and compared its significance in contemporary Chinese cinema to Jia Zhangke's debut Xiao Wu seven years earlier.³^•¹²

The film's profile remained modest inside China, where it circulated as an underground or independent film seen by relatively few people, while it collected awards internationally.⁴ MK2 bought the film for French distribution and had it blown up to 35mm for theatrical release; in North America it later reached home-video and streaming audiences through dGenerate Films and, from 2021, the Criterion Channel.¹^•¹³

The Oxhide series

Liu continued the project with Oxhide II (牛皮2, 2009), again playing the same three family members with no crew beyond the household cats. The sequel consists of nine fixed shots arranged around the family dinner table, each rotated 45 degrees from the last, covering 132 minutes of real time as the parents and daughter make, cook, and eat dumplings while discussing the closed shop; the family had by then gone through the father's bankruptcy in the story.⁷^•⁶ Oxhide II was selected for Directors' Fortnight at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.⁶ Liu spoke at the time of a planned Oxhide III, with a script in progress, though no third film appeared; after a hiatus of about fourteen years she returned to conventional production with the 2023 theatrical feature All Ears (不虚此行).⁸^•¹⁴

The two films are frequently cited as milestones of Chinese independent cinema and as extreme examples of digital long-take "slow cinema," in which ordinary domestic activities, from kneading dough to boiling dumplings, occupy the screen at their real duration.¹⁴^•¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Individual biographical and docudrama films › Business, law, and journalism

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

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