“I am the stranger who sails the river of solitude.” (Liu Chunhe)
Liu Chunhe is a twenty-year-old man affected by cerebral palsy—the oldest mystery in neurology.
His existence is a continuous crossing of limits imposed by physical reality and by a society still incapable of confronting diversity in terms of equal dignity. His story is not one of “victory over disability” or artificial heroism, but rather a subtle and rigorous investigation into how an authentic identity is built within the labyrinth of marginality and family relationships.
Chunhe does not simply wish to be accepted: he calmly, firmly, and tirelessly demands the rights of one who knows what it means to live an entire life as a disabled person, to be recognized as a “normal” individual in his aspirations, ambitions, and intellectual capacities. This word—“normal”—resonates as a political claim before being a personal one, a warning against reduction to a pitiful image or emotional segregation. Chunhe wishes to attend a “normal” university, teach poetry to children, work with dignity, love and be loved, live his sexuality—perhaps with Yaya, who has shown him attention—while confronting rejection and prejudice, walking on his own legs in a world that continuously denies him this possibility.
He also wants to work as a bartender, proving he can memorize the menu after reading it only minutes before and reciting extremely difficult wordplays, while the superficial “sustainability” exploits his otherness, instrumentalizing it.
The stray cat Thunder God, found on the street, died and his ashes are kept in a tin box: Thunder walked like him and had only three legs. Chunhe often sleeps hugging a skeleton, something he has done since childhood.
The film addresses, with balance and without indulging in pathos, the tragic tension between the selfish overprotection of a mother who wants to limit her son’s freedom and the grandmother who, with her almost ancestral strength, embodies an idea of love that refuses boundaries or renunciations. This family dialectic is the beating heart of the story, a site of conflict between grandmother and mother, and mother and son: a conflict of possibilities where Chunhe’s fragile yet unstoppable body becomes the center of a broader discourse on responsibility, fear, and hope.
He is highly skilled at the keyboard, helping the grandmother’s elderly friends handle online bureaucratic procedures to prove they are alive and continue receiving their pensions.
Visually sober, almost minimalist, Big World avoids rhetorical effects. The camera respectfully lingers on small actions, expressions, those daily gestures that become symbolically charged. Imperfect handwriting, the gesture of standing up to give a seat to a lady, poetry recited to children with eyes searching for attention and understanding: these details build a complex human universe, made of fragility and resistance.
Chunhe is a solitary traveler on the river of solitude, as he himself writes in his poems. The film accompanies this journey with a narration that, despite its apparent simplicity, opens onto universal questions about the meaning of life, about a perceived rejection—his mother’s—about normality, about the dignity of those who live differently from the dominant paradigm.
Big World does not resolve into a story of individual redemption, but becomes an expression of a cultural and political crisis: to what extent is society ready to recognize difference as a foundational element of the human? What is the weight of adult selfishness, fear of the other, the loss of true gazes versus those that show only disgust, fear, pity?
Yang Lina’s Big World presents itself as a work of rare depth and stylistic coherence, a narrative that challenges conventional categories of disability cinema to transform into an existential meditation on the human condition, dignity, and freedom.
This film is a radical invitation to reflect, without concessions to sentimentality, on what it means to live a life worth living when the body becomes both a limit and a path of exploration. An existentially rich narrative that, thanks to an impeccable cast and a strategic direction, asserts itself as a radical work.
“The executioner on the bridge is killing dreams.” (Liu Chunhe)
