Out of Focus
( Xu Jiao )

Shengze Zhu
2014 - 88 min - Couleur - Chine

On a steamy summer day in 2012, I started to teach photography at Lingzhi Elementary School in Wuhan, China with a group of 23 "migrant children" aged 8-12, since then both the children and me used cameras to explore. Lingzhi is known as the "rooftop" school, because its classes are held in a worn-down, four-floor apartment building with a rooftop playground for about 200 students. All of them are "migrant children" who are originally from rural areas but come with their job-seeking parents to urban cities in search of a better life.
When those children migrated to the most populous city in Central China from the tranquil countryside, most of them fell in love with the bustling city, Wuhan at their first glance. They were intrigued by the city life, and tried to get away from the poor family and the genetic past. They were ambitious about the future and had various dreams. Nevertheless, they had to endure miserable living conditions due to the low income of their families and a discriminatory household registration policy known as Hukou. The distance between the innocence of hopes and the brutality of life seems to remind that - would their dreams become pipe dreams?