Deming Chen’s Always follows eight-year-old poet Youbin Gong over five years in a mountainous Hunan province village. Living with his disabled father and grandparents while his mother is mysteriously absent, Gong represents China’s “left-behind children”—a reality Chen knows intimately, having been raised by grandparents himself. Rigorous, long takes and intimate black-and-white compositions are punctuated by poems of piercing beauty, observing the inner worlds of a childhood transitioning into adolescence.