Once Here integrates the vocabularies of experimental film, essay film, and poetic cinema. The filmmaker intervenes through performance art, extending bodily action into the moving image. Structured in three chapters as a cinematic polyphony, the film was shot on the Qinghai Plateau in western China.
The first chapter, Haiyan County, follows the filmmaker as he walks through the ruins of Factory 221—China’s first nuclear weapons research and assembly base—with a circular mirror embedded behind his head. The word “WHO” is handwritten on its surface. Built in 1958 and decommissioned in 1987, the factory appears in fragments: broken windows, rusted railways, the vast sky.
The second chapter, Gangcha County, finds the same mirror drifting across the remnants of a labor camp established in the same year, 1958. The filmmaker finally stops before a wall that cannot be crossed.
The third chapter has no image. Two Kazakh folk songs hummed against the wind carry the story of a nomadic people’s exile and migration.
Three histories, built by will, abandoned by change. The word “WHO” written on the mirror reads like a question—and also like an answer. The wind on the plateau simply watches.

Program Education through culture, forum with pupils from “Andon Zako Çajupi” High School.