This first feature by Cai Shangjun (screenwriter on Yang Zhang’s Shower) explores the personal costs of economic change in China’s agricultural heartland. A father and son struggle to make ends meet as itinerant labourers during the wheat harvest in fertile Gansu Province. Their story takes on political resonance as the merciless sweep of history pulls them away from the countryside and towards the cities.

The film follows Song, a man who returns home after five catastrophic years in the city to find that his son Yongtao has declared him dead and taken the deeds to his property. As Song re-establishes his role as paterfamilias, Yongtao’s burning resentment at being abandoned for five years drives him to spontaneous (if futile) acts of violence against his father. Nevertheless, father and son set out together in the titular red combine-harvester to seek a hard-scrabble living in the rolling wheat fields...

Cai uses potent symbolism to drive the narrative. Yongtao’s stubborn preference for using a sickle, for instance, rather than learning how to drive the combine-harvester, hints at a youthful romance with traditional Communist values and imagery. But the combine is “Red” too, he eventually concedes. His acceptance of mechanisation is a key step in his personal growth, and the film thus becomes acutely allegorical: as Yongtao matures from a stubborn child into a pragmatic adult, he moves from his agricultural homeland into the city. Yongtao’s fitful adolescence mirrors China’s development from a predominantly agricultural society into a modern, urbanised one.

Cai does not pass explicit judgment on this process. For better or worse, it makes Yongtao a more desperate person, not a better one. Rather, in his sensitive depiction of Song – abandoned in the march towards the cities, but struggling onwards through crushing poverty – Cai sings an ode to those left behind by the relentless drive towards modernity.