Following his ascent to the international stage, Chinese film director Fan Jian has turned abruptly backward and inward.

No stranger to global cinema, Fan has made intimate, character-driven documentaries since 2003 on topics ranging from China’s SARS outbreak to migrant workers. His 2016 documentary Still Tomorrow, about the poet Yu Xiuhua, launched him into the global spotlight, garnering the Special Jury Award at IDFA in the Netherlands.

Yet at FIRST Film Festival this July, where Fan premiered the highly anticipated After the Rain, he said: “I know Western audiences may not understand this film.”

In fact, he’d deliberately set out to make such a movie. At a documentary forum in Beijing this April, Fan said: “Especially after the pandemic, I am more aware that the world we embraced was the documentary industry dominated by Europe and North America. Their aesthetics, their way of telling stories, their cultural thinking...affect the language of the movie, the structure of the movie. Where is our own cinematic language? Where are our own cinematic concepts?”

After the Rain is Fan’s answer to those questions. Fan tells TWOC that he aimed to tell a story “through the lens of Eastern philosophy”—the understanding of life, death, and time as nonlinear and circular; sometimes moving backward, or experiencing hiccups. Fan compares himself to Asian directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand, who he says makes films within his own cultural context and does not seek to “reconcile” his works with Western perceptions of the world.

To make After the Rain, Fan spent two decades following two couples who lost their children to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that claimed 69,000 lives, including many children buried under shoddily constructed school buildings. Enrolling in a government program providing free in-vitro fertilization (IVF) for bereaved older couples, Ye Hongmei and Zhu Junsheng, who lost their 7-year-old daughter Xingyu in the quake, believe that having another child will help rebuild their family and restore purpose to their lives.

We see Ye and Zhu chat with another couple about their deceased children in a brightly lit hospital room as they prepare for IVF. Boy or girl? How old were they? Which school did they go to? They nod silently in expressions of mutual grief. Ye and Zhu pray for a baby girl, believing that the child will be the reincarnation of their daughter. When they have a boy instead, they are crushed that Xingyu did not return to the world to be with them.