Soul Calling Notes

In Shiban Town, on the border of western Hunan and Guizhou, Lin Shen spent his childhood in the back of his grandmother's "Shouting Soul". The so-called soul calling is an ancient local ritual for frightened children. Bowls of rice, sticks of incense, and calls walking on the bluestone road have repeatedly made children with high fevers miraculously recover. His father, who firmly believed in physical formulas, dismissed it as "that set of" statistical deviations, but Lin Shen glimpsed a mysterious corner of those "coincidences" that could not be measured. When I was sixteen years old, my grandmother passed away and her voice was gone. Lin Shenwen went to Beijing to study film and television. He took up the camera and spent ten years imprinting his footprints on the edges and corners of folk beliefs such as Nuo opera, sea worship, and death. Since the physical formula can only describe "yes and no", he used the camera to capture the edge of yin and yang that "may exist". His studio is filled with hard drives, which together form half a map of Chinese folk beliefs. He has not returned to his hometown for fourteen years, thinking that the secrets belonging to Shiban Town have been buried with his grandmother. Until the age of thirty-two, a late-night phone call from the mysterious department "749 Bureau" suddenly shattered the peace. Three strange incidents of "lost souls" of children occurred in my hometown. ——It turns out that the soul has never been extinguished; And on that road back home covered with sunset, something was waiting for him.