A TV documentary looks at the terrible dilemmas families often face when loved ones enter their final days, Wang Qian reports.

A beloved relative is facing the end of her journey. Crucial decisions have to be made at the most emotionally charged moment. The patient is in an intensive care unit. The soft whoosh of lifesaving devices provides a monotonous soundtrack. The members of a particular family are meeting in Luoyang, Henan province, to deal with this heart-wrenching scenario.

Their dilemma, familiar to many families, is recorded unedited in the one-shot documentary, The Choice, directed by Gu Xue. The discussion lasts 65 minutes with the camera slowly turning left or right to focus on the speakers or listeners at the gathering.

The patient is the family's fifth aunt. And the question is simple yet fraught with anxiety and angst. It centers on whether to take the 54-year-old woman home or let her stay in hospital. The conversation involves more than 10 family members spanning two generations. Her son, Shi Hengbo, who is still in college, is present. There is little chance of recovery but the question, when to say the final goodbye, requires an urgent answer, both for financial and practical reasons.

"The discussion is quite familiar and the moment I was there, I decided to record it," Gu, 33, says. "It is a question that I have no answer to. Nor does the movie provide one."

As the film's title, The Choice, indicates, it is a question facing every one: If it is you in hospital, what is your choice? If it is your beloved in hospital, what is your choice?

The documentary, with no voice-over, premiered in the international section at the 42nd Cinema du Reel Film Festival in Paris in March 2020. It won the "emerging international filmmaker "award at the Open City Documentary Festival in London in September and was shown at the Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival in December. The film was screened on DocYard, an award-winning film and discussion series at the Brattle Theater in the US state of Massachusetts from March 26 to April 1.

Gu says what makes the movie special is that it provides a "different perspective to look at family relationships".

Wu Wenguang, a longtime documentary filmmaker, says: "In one go, a door to the inner part of a family is open to the audience."

Inge Coolsaet from Point of View, a Canadian magazine that covers documentaries and independent films, writes: "With bare simplicity, the film captures the essence of this familial drama. Observing the family meeting across gender, generations and class in one single take, Gu opts for clarity, directness and transparency."

According to DocYard, The Choice "powerfully reduces cinema down to its simplest form in order to reveal the complexity of life".

Gu says she is happy that the film has made people reflect on their own family. Most people will face the life-and-death conversation concerning their beloved one day, but before that moment comes, death is not exactly a frequent topic of family discussions around the dinner table.

"Through the communication with the audiences, my understanding of the film has expanded. The interactive part makes me thrilled," Gu says.

Behind the scenes

The shooting of the film has been improvised, according to Gu. The moment was caught when she was working on another documentary, The Chinese Plaster, which followed a family of three generations over the course of more than one year of their lives in Luoyang.

"Both films highlight family relationships, but in different ways," Gu says, adding that her one-year stay with the family helped her to establish a relaxed and close relationship with them.

"It is not easy for outsiders to get into or even talk about the truth of family dynamics, which are always intensely private," she says.

Through The Choice, Gu reflects on and questions her own family ties, which have been estranged for a long time.

Born in Chengde, Hebei province, Gu's mother has nine brothers and sisters. When her grandmother was paralyzed after a stroke at 78, her mother took care of her for 10 years.

Gu still remembers that once her grandmother told her mother to let her die, because it was too painful to live, and her mother insisted that if she was not taken away by God, she should live.

During the family reunion at Spring Festival, in Gu's memory, it was like a "show" that the relatives, with their own families now numbering 10, came to see her grandmother and talked and laughed over dinner. All this, according to Gu, while her ailing grandmother was in the next room.

"It makes me uncomfortable and I feel something false inside," Gu says.

"If you understand the relationships in family, it will help to know how society operates," she adds.

According to the film's introduction at the Open City Documentary Festival, The Choice is a quietly gripping, anthropologically attuned drama examining the complex dynamics, hierarchies and internal conflicts of a Chinese family living through its darkest hour.

During the family's hourlong meeting, the collective decision-making process shifts from repetition to persuasion and then conclusion. The aunt, it is decided, should stay in hospital for now.

"Leaving everything, including the repetition, unedited is my choice to restore the environment and chemistry at the gathering, which feels right for the scene," Gu explains.

"It may just be a short glimpse of life. I hope the time and space of the viewer are exactly the same as the time and space that happened when I recorded it. I try to preserve the true texture of the event."

Future plan

Shooting The Choice made Gu start to look at her own family. She began a 10-year recording project of her mother's family last year. Every year, there is a topic for the 10 families to talk about. This year's topic was marriage.

Last year, during her quarantine period around Spring Festival due to the outbreak of COVID-19, Gu was anxious and wanted to do something, which reminded her of The Decameron by the 14th century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio. In the book, 10 people tell stories when they shelter in a secluded villa outside Florence in order to escape the plague afflicting the city.

Letting each family member read a piece of news, she recorded their appearance and voice during their home quarantine period last year, which opened her 10-year project.

"They have been honest to me in front of the camera. Before the shooting, I didn't realize how little I knew about them. Their answers really surprised me, which is also the charm of a documentary-the unpredictability and complexity," Gu says.

Although shooting independent films does not make her life better, financially, she has been happy about her life, but still trying to make some money.

Having received her master's in arts from the Communication University of China in Beijing, she is also involved in film-related activities such as the Inner Mongolia Youth Film Week as co-founder, the Fitzcarraldo Film Festival as a curator and the First International Film Festival Xining or the Grassland Film Workshop as a planner.

The Choice has an emotional subject that touches almost everyone. At the end of the interview in a cozy cafe in Song Zhuang, a small town on the outskirts of Beijing, a woman dressed in pink in her 30s, who had overheard the conversation, politely interrupted and shared her own, forthright, opinions on marriage and family.

The aunt in the documentary sadly passed away a week after the family meeting.