The Tunnels Where We Incarnated unfolds from a gateway shaped by birth, interruption, and spiritual return. Combining documentary footage with AI-generated imagery, the film imagines a joint perspective formed between my unborn brother and myself as the born sister: an egalitarian way of seeing before identity settles into pronounced and rigid hierarchies. The camera moves through tunnels, loess caves, burial corridors, and grottoes, all resembling the passages inside a womb that connect the born and unborn. Across these passages, dreams, religious rituals, and memories merge into a single field where living and unlived lives entangled and the structure of the world redefined.

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The story traces two pregnancies carried by my mother during the years of China’s one-child policy: one life ended before birth, and one hidden into survival. My mother had vivid and symbolic conception dreams (胎梦)during both pregnancies, which served as important omens and premonitions arriving before decisive moments. Before losing her first child, she dreamt of a massive stone dragon with one eye chasing her fiercely. After a car accident revealed her conception through an X-ray examination, she chose to terminate the pregnancy, fearing the radiation might have harmed the foetus and the subsequent suffering such a life might face in the world. The decision carried enormous grief and enduring guilt, marking the ending of her first child before he could arrive.

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Years later, she found herself to be pregnant with me after already having one child (my sister) during the enforcement of the one-child policy. While concealing the pregnancy under the pressure of state policy, she dreamt again of chickens scalded alive, one body stripped featherless yet still escaping. The dream arrived as both the accumulative tremendous fear from threats, and a message from the shared consciousness of the baby and the mother within the same body. Following the forewarning from the dream, my mother decided to step out of the house the next morning to take a walk after months hiding indoor, only shortly before officials came looking for her to force an abortion.

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Though my arrival in this world was regarded as a blessing and destined, my mother soon struggled to reconcile the suffering she endured to bring me into being with the tensions between us that followed. As a devout Buddhist, my mother sought enlightenment from a Buddhist Upāsikā, who spoke of the continuation of consciousness beyond bodily death, guided by karmic ties and unfinished relations. The spiritual vision revealed that her unborn first child had transmigrated to my body with his unresolved resentment of early termination. My seemingly disagreeable personality and the ongoing conflicts with my mother were seen as evidence of this shared inhabitation: a life interrupted seeking resolution through another body. 

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Within this shared inhabitation, both the unborn brother and the born sister exist at the borderline of social legibility: one a lingering spirit requiring exorcism, the other a daughter defying familial and societal expectation. A shared position emerges shaped by misalignment with the social order, standing outside the conventional frame through which society classifies value and identity, we begin to see differently. All beings are no longer organised by worth or prestige, but encountered as a field of coexisting presences. It is this displaced perspective that shapes the film’s gaze: an attention that refuses hierarchy and looks across bodies, places, and objects with equal regard.

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Documentary footages of abandoned villages, temples, livestock markets were shot across three provinces (Zhejiang, Shanxi, Xinjiang) of China. Goats pass through markets, tourists photograph stone Buddhas, villages age into emptiness, offerings accumulate beneath statues, and ruins quietly absorb new economies of attention; each frame carries the weight of social stratification that classify life, assign value, and turn existence into transaction. On contrary is our incarnated perspective, through which the world is liberated from social structures rooted in institutionalised dominance and prestige. The notion of inferior and superior is dismantled as we travel to different places through the tunnels, the world loosens the distinction between human and animal, sacred relic and discarded debris, sentient and inanimate bodies. Everything everywhere is accorded equal attention and fundamental worth. Afterall, we are all briefly being a part of the circulation, pause, or vanish. The consciousness flows within the perpetual cycle of life, death, and rebirth, where the self remains despite the changing forms. In ruins and deserted structures where traces of human desire persist as material residue, time seems arrested and history freezes at this moment. Alternatively, the physical form could vanish from abortion, demolition, or permanent separation. 

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In the final movement, the inverted torch light as a black dot drifting away and fades from the screen, marking the eventual ritual that exorcised my unborn brother from me, though I see it as a departure chosen rather than imposed. Not every consciousness seeks to fully incarnate.