Zhang Zhongchen Remarkable Journey from factory floor to filmmaker

If Good Will Hunting were to get a Chinese remake, Zhang Zhongchen could be the protagonist. Just swap Matt Damon’s math wunderkind for a Chinese arthouse prodigy.

Zhang, now 34, was born to a poor family in a small village in China’s Anhui province. After high school, like so many rural young people of that era, he went to work in a factory, making air-conditioning units for international export. But the harsh conditions and relentless pace of the assembly line soon wore him down, so in 2011, he decamped for the nation’s capital to pursue the promise of a job alongside his older brother, who was employed as a security guard at the Beijing Film Academy, China’s most prestigious film school. Once there and on the job, Zhang took to wandering the institution’s halls before and after his security-guard shifts, occasionally slipping into a seat at the back of lectures.

“One day, I stumbled upon a class where a professor was discussing cinematic language — it was then that I became captivated by art films,” he remembers. “I began watching arthouse movies constantly.”

Zhang requested night shifts so that he could attend more lectures. He saved money and bought himself a laptop so he could teach himself digital editing. He formed friendships with both the academy’s students and fellow security staff who had been drawn there by the same creative yearning — to be close to the magic of moviemaking.

Around 2015, Zhang began working as an editor for hire (he later edited Dongmei Li’s Mama, which screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2017). By 2021, he had enough allies and a reputation to direct his first small-budget arthouse feature, The White Cow. A rural-set drama inspired by memories from Zhang’s youth, it went on to win best feature and best director at China’s First Film Festival, the country’s preeminent indie event (think China’s version of Sundance).

“Many of the main crew members on The White Cow were my former security-guard colleagues from the Beijing Film Academy,” Zhang says. “We’ve continued collaborating into my second film, Nighttime Sounds.”

Nighttime Sounds could prove to be Zhang’s breakthrough. The film will premiere next week at Spain’s San Sebastián Film Festival (Sept. 19–27), the director’s first major international festival outing. The feature is also being offered to international buyers at Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market (Sept. 20-23).

Nighttime Sounds blends social realism with surrealist elements to tell a moving and visually arresting story about the burdens and desires harbored by women in China’s rural villages. The film unfolds from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl named Qing (Aline Chen), who lives and works the land with her mother, Hongmei (Li Yanxi), while her father toils in a factory in a faraway city.

Set in Maozhuang Village, where real-life 800-year-old Song-dynasty stone statues stand sentry amid vast wheat fields, the film uses arthouse technique to express the inner yearnings of Qing and her mother, who otherwise stay silent about their emotional worlds. One day, while walking to school, Qing meets a pale, ghostlike boy (Gu Hanru) searching for his missing mother. His arrival stirs faint whispers under the Song statues and quietly nudges Hongmei’s buried past toward the surface. Mixing superstition, memory, and the tremors of family secrets, Zhang’s film unfolds as a delicate and atmospheric drama about how children hear what adults won’t, or can’t, share.

“My mother is a rural woman — part of a marginalized group in China whose emotional lives are often overlooked,” Zhang explains. “I wanted to make a film about them. In rural China, most young people leave to seek work in big cities, while the elderly, women, and children stay behind. They remain deeply connected to the land — and their emotional secrets often seem to me, buried within it.”

Zhang writes his scripts while taking research trips to the landscapes and spaces he hopes to film, taking cues from the surroundings and imagining their expressive possibilities. While location scouting in Gongyi, in China’s Henan province, he came upon the ancient Song-dynasty statues that sit, as if abandoned and forgotten by time, amid local farmers’ working fields.

“They have stood in the wheat fields for centuries, much like generations of farmers. I wanted these statues to give the film a deeper, more expansive dimension,” he says.

The film’s surrealist touches came from the tactile experience of the landscape, too: “While filming night scenes in the wheat fields, the set was dark and quiet. When the wind blew, the rustling of the wheat ears sounded as if the wheat itself was whispering.”

He devised the image of the mysterious pale boy who shows up in the story as a stand-in for “an imagined emotion — in reality, the love that rural Chinese women are often forced to live without.”

Of the film’s expressive style — a plastic raincoat that suddenly takes flight and soars over the village in long tracking shots; a sound design that imputes murmurings to the landscapes — Zhang says he was inspired by the surreal stories he often heard in everyday conversation while growing up in China’s countryside.

“During creation, I tried to film magical elements realistically and realistic elements magically — such as the flames burning across the soil [during the clearing of the fields].”

Zhang hopes Nighttime Sounds will use arthouse technique to convey the unspoken emotional lives of rural villagers — feelings rarely expressed even within their own communities, let alone to outsiders unfamiliar with China’s countryside.

“I believe the power of imagery can transcend cultural barriers to resonate with viewers across backgrounds,” he says.