This article was originally published on Neocha and is republished with permission.
โA pound of pork, two sprigs of spring onion, then mince up some onion and ginger. Add the salt and pepper, stir it up, and then the meat filling is ready.โ
The opening scene and accompanying dialogue to The Coin, a short film by Chinese director Song Siqi, is enough to leave peoplesโ stomachs growling, not only for food but for the flavors of home.
At age 10, Song moved abroad to study and she spent most of her adolescent years at a boarding school. She never spent a long stint of time back home until university, where she attended school in both Los Angeles and Beijing. These experiences have largely altered her idea of home. Whenever she traveled back to China to visit friends and family, it never felt like homeโshe felt like a visitor. In Songโs work though, she approaches the topic of โhomeโ with unabashed clarity and confidence.
The Coin centers on the Chinese New Year tradition of slipping a coin inside a dumplingโs filling. Whoever eats the coin-stuffed dumpling is believed to be endowed with good fortune for the rest of the year. โThe coin is essentially a wish, a blessing from your own family,โ she says.
To capture what this tradition means to her, Song decided to animate the entire dumpling-making process, from preparing the filling and rolling out the dough to wrapping and cooking them. Of course, the most essential ingredient of all wasnโt forgotten: the coin, which to Song, was a โmultifaceted symbol that represents parental love and a connection to heritage.โ
The six-minute-long film is made up of over 5,000 stop-motion frames, but being a completely independent production, it took nine months to complete.
In the film, the female protagonist is moving away from home to a foreign country. On her journey, sheโs brought a jar filled with coins collected from the lucky dumplings sheโs eaten over the years. Upon arriving, she decides to grab lunch at a local cafe. As soon as she sits down though, she realizes that she left her jar on the train. This realization begins a nightmarish sequence into her psyche, where sheโs attacked by an assortment of Western dishesโhamburgers, pasta, and pizzas. Every circular ingredient on these dishes reminds her of her lucky coins, but theyโre just not quite the same. This hellish episode represents the intrusion of Western culture, which seems ready to happily erase her Eastern roots. With the coins missing, has the good luck she accused over the years also run out? Is her connection to her homeland forever gone, never to be found again?
Thankfully, the film ends on a happy note. Looking deeper inwardsโshown by the protagonist entering her own stomachโshe discovers the coin, the symbol of her heritage, isnโt really gone. One of the missing coins is embedded in her stomach lining. As it turns out, cultural roots arenโt that easily upended. โโFindingโ the coin again is a blessing that Iโm giving myself,โ Song says.
Home and family are topics close to Songโs heart, and this affinity is obvious throughout her work. Her short film Sister, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Animated Short Film category, follows these same thematics. โI designed the characters and sets based on old family photos,โ she says. โI wanted to tell a story through the lens of my childhood nostalgia.โ
Sister is about an only child whoโs dreamed up an imaginary sister. He conceives an elaborate story in his mind, of them playing around and growing up together. โItโs based on my own brother,โ Song says. โItโs rare to have siblings because of the one-child policy in China. Growing up, when people would hear I had an older brother, theyโd ask me, โWhat was it like growing up with an older brother?’โ With this in mind, the story was meant to capture the โunique experience of growing up in her generation.โ
In the film, the two siblingsโ interactions and mannerisms are all based on Songโs real experiences. Growing up, she and her brother often fought over the most trivial of matters. โWe were kids though,โ she laughs. โNow that weโre older, we donโt really fight. Weโre quite close.โ
Songโs brother, now studying as a post-grad, is even working with her on a script about immigrating to the U.S. In real life, her parents are also far more progressive than their in-film counterparts. Song considers herself quite lucky. Even though her parents donโt come from creative backgrounds, theyโre fully supportive of her artistic ambitions.
In summing up Sister, Song wrote a singular line: โDedicated to the siblings we never had.โ With this film, she hopes for viewers to walk away with a new perspective on familial love. This heightened sensitivity to family dynamics is perhaps what makes her work so touchingโshe taps into the primal human yearning to belong and be loved.
As someone whoโs experienced both of Western and Eastern culture, Song has conflicting feelings: sometimes the world feels so minuscule, while other times it can feel immensely vast, with large gaps between us as individuals. โI hope people can empathize with one another, and through stories with universal themes, people can realize that theyโre not all that different,โ she says. โThrough my films, I want to bring different people together.โ
