Wasteland Coordinates

On the festering edge of the city, huge scrapyards exude an air of decay. This is Lao Chen's last battlefield - a tombstone salesman with terminal cancer, selling "eternal rest" between chemotherapy treatments, but himself trapped in the quagmire of death. When the camera of Internet celebrity Xiao Yu breaks in, packaging his pain into the traffic code of "death aesthetics"; when his wife Lin Wan calmly prepares a cheap urn for herself and uses an old lipstick to sign her decision to "donate the body" on her suicide note; when Lao Chen finally collapses in the cold pile of fish scales in the vegetable market, the lipstick tightly clenched in his hand rolls down into the mud... The dignity of life collapses in front of consumer filters, cold protocols and the roughness of survival. Their son Xiaowei was thrown into this spiritual wasteland. One of the parents' ashes sank into a dirty ditch, and the other was buried deep in the mud. He refuses Xiaoyu's attempt to turn tragedy into a hypocritical "humanistic project", and is even less able to stop the bulldozer from erasing marginal memories. So, he used concrete blocks from the garbage dump and mud from the sewage ditch to personally pour a huge, silent **Unknown Monument** on the waste soil where his parents were buried. This monument is his coordinate against nothingness. When the camera and the steel are close again, and when the old scavenger digs up the buried empty iron box, Xiaowei clings to the stone monument with his flesh and blood body, letting out a silent roar in the pouring rain. In the torrent of forgetfulness and consumption, this coordinate created by wasteland and life marks the humblest and most thrilling weight of existence itself.