‘The Botanist’ review: Award-winning Chinese drama finds magic in nature

Dir/scr. Jing Yi. China. 2025. 96 mins

A paean to nature which overflows with bucolic imagery but soon runs dry on cohesive narrative, The Botanist nonetheless marks an auspicious debut for writer-director Jing Yi. Like many Chinese indies, it takes place in a remote location – a village in the arid grasslands of Xinjiang near the Kazakhstan border, one of China’s few multicultural areas comprising Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and various other ethnic groups. Yet his celebration of landscape from the perspective of a boy in thrall to its endless wonder stands apart from the earthy lyricism of such regional portraits as Wang Quebo’s Knife In The Clear Water (2016) or Huo Meng’s Living The Land. Jing instead shares the lucid dream sensibility of Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), both directed by his mentor Bi Gan.

More of an aesthetic experience than an emotional one

The Botanist premiered in the Generation Kplus section at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prize of the international jury. Further exposure at high profile events should follow, but speciality market appeal is likely modest at best. For all its eye-catching qualities, the film suffers from a slightness that is more characteristic of a promising calling card than a fully-fledged breakthrough feature.

Set in the 2010s, the film follows 13-year-old Kazakh boy Arsin (Yesl Jahseleh) who prefers communing with nature to playing with the other village youths. He is an aspiring botanist who collects specimens and methodically takes notes about his discoveries. Even when he starts spending time with Meiyu (Ren Zihan), a precocious Han Chinese girl whose father (Liu Yongqiang) owns the local store, it’s because she reminds him of a rare plant. It’s all rather idyllic, yet there is a sense that the introspective Arsin is grappling with forms of absence.

Arsin’s parents are presumably working elsewhere, as he is being raised by his grandmother (Sarhet Eramazan). His uncle, who was similarly fascinated by plants, disappeared under mysterious circumstances several years ago. Arsin herds a flock of sheep with his brother (Jalen Nurdaolet) who has recently returned to the village following a failed attempt to build a life in Beijing, but the older sibling now mostly lives through his cellphone. When Meiyu reveals that she will be attending boarding school in Shanghai, the news is quietly shattering.

The Botanist can be categorised as a coming-of-age drama, but it is one where the young protagonist does not actually undergo significant change or realisation. It’s an interesting take on an overly populated sub-genre, but one that does not leave Jing anywhere to go after a certain juncture. As such, the film engages in choice repetitions or goes off on surreal folkloric tangents that echo the magical realism of Emir Kusturica (Arsin has several encounters with a deadpan talking horse that may embody the wandering spirit of his missing uncle). These episodes are certainly atmospheric, but the film often seems disorganised and its dream logic is not particularly compelling, despite Jing’s effort to familiarise the audience with nomadic beliefs through Arsin’s voice-over.

This means that The Botanist is more of an aesthetic experience than an emotional one. Li Vanon’s cinematography evokes the ecocinema of Terrence Malick;  the depth and texture of his compositions range from stunning wide shots of pastures to the compex beauty of flora captured in delicate close-up. The ravishing palette is complemented by a spellbinding score from Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian, which incorporates natural sounds of rustling leaves and flowing water and ranges from gentle Kazakh melodies to robust traditional arrangements that ramp up the other-worldly ambience. Indeed, the film’s visual and aural elements are so transfixing that glimpses of modernity via cellphone photos and videos feel not only intrusive, but even dystopian.

Within the reverie, there is a smattering of social-political commentary. Arsin sees no issue in forging a bond across ethnicities – “She may be Han Chinese, but so what?” – yet others disagree. A scene in which Arsin helps Meiyu’s father test his shop’s newly installed security camera, the boy framed dispassionately in the monitor,  foreshadows how Xinjiang would be come to be described as a surveillance state by the decade’s end. There are also radio broadcasts declaring that Xinjiang is on the verge of economic development due to the production of chemicals and the mining of raw materials, but fires in the landscape indicate that prosperity will come at an environmental cost. Such pointedness helps to ground an airy film that is too content to drift in the space between its protagonist’s lonely reality and rich inner world.