6:30pm
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May 1, 2025 at 6:30 pm
May the Soil be Everywhere
A film by Yehui Zhao
We’re honored to co-present a very special evening of cinema and conversation as part of this year’s Prismatic Ground festival, in collaboration with BAM — the New York premiere of May the Soil Be Everywhere, a deeply personal and poetic documentary by filmmaker Yehui Zhao!
UnionDocs is especially proud to support this remarkable work as its fiscal sponsor — and even more so to have shared the very first work-in-progress version of the film back in 2022, as part of our program The Land Will Wake Up and Devour Us. It’s a joy to witness how far the project has come and to celebrate it now on the big screen!
May the Soil Be Everywhereis tender and poetic matriarchal ode by Yehui Zhao, whose short film Hei’er was featured in the second edition of Prismatic Ground. In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family endured wars, the communist revolution, and the deadliest famine. Persecution and hardship eventually forced the family to scatter. Against the backdrop of China’s rapid urbanization, the filmmaker sets out to unearth her family’s enduring bond with this long-forgotten village, hidden deeply in the vast mountain range of the Loess Plateau.
With remarkable intimacy and care, Zhao threads together memory, migration, and matriarchal lineage into a quiet, moving portrait of belonging. May the Soil Be Everywhere traces the contours of home and connection, offering a gentle meditation on what it means to remain rooted in a world that keeps shifting.
Join us for a post-screening conversation with the filmmaker, reflecting on the emotional, historical, and cinematic threads woven throughout this extraordinary work. Come through!
Program
May the Soil be Everywhere
96 mins, 2025
Program Duration: 96 mins
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
Yehui Zhao is a multi-media artist whose work explores migration, decolonization, heritage, and regeneration. As an immigrant born in China and living in the US, Yehui thinks of film as her third language. Her work takes root in the feminist legacies of the global south, drawing inspiration from revolutionary history, womanhood and daughtership, and the community’s undocumented collective memory. Yehui’s films have been featured at UnionDocs, DOC NYC, Prismatic Ground, Microscope Gallery, Asian American International Film Festival, Spain Moving Images Festival, Timeless Awards, Festival of Animated Objects, and other programs. Yehui has published paintings, prints, and writing at Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Review and Action, and Spectacle. She is a recipient of the IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts grant, and the York Women in Film and Television Scholarship. Yehui holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University. Yehui is an Adjunct Professor at Marymount Manhattan College in the Communication and Media Arts Department, and she currently serves as the Art Director of 128 LIT, an award-winning international art and literature platform and publisher.
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