If In Between Days takes a stripped neo-realist approach to storytelling and Offside continues with its maker’s own obsessive relationship with a quasi-documented reality, then Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide represents the borders between fiction and documentary at their most permeable. In itself, this is already the most celebrated Chinese debut since Jia Zhang-ke’s Xiao Wu, though formally, it differs from Jia’s film in important ways.

Oxhide is composed of exactly 23 static shots (captured in widescreen DV) of the routine daily lives of the young director, her parents, and their cat in their cramped Beijing apartment, as they quarrel endlessly, worry and lose sleep over their failing business of handmade leather handbags, yet come together in unexpected moments of warmth and humour, so intimate and realistically developed over lengthy single takes that the fictional nature of the film is prepensely thwarted in every scene. Liu’s frequent framing of objects/bodies in disorienting extreme close-ups opens up an off-screen space that, in fascinatingly ironic gestures, parallels the challenged physical and financial growth of Liu and her father, respectively, and markedly exaggerates the lack of space in their typified Beijing apartment. Emphasis isn’t on bodies, but on pressing spaces, objects, surfaces, and whatever happens to interact with them during the course of the shot. The results are far more rewarding than expected, many of its chapters tinged with dry but affectionate humour, and a sense of serene kinship which surfaces in extended moments like when the family dines together, or – in an especially memorable scene – when the parents mournfully examine whipping scars on an oxhide, directly following a scene of domestic violence. Undulating landscapes, indeed.—Mubarak Ali