This one works on you slowly, the way a shovel works on dirt. It opens in 1917 on the Chianan Plain, where the whole shape of a life is set by how far you have to carry water home, and it never once pretends engineering is exciting. Yoichi Hatta shows up with a plan nobody asked for and nobody believes, and the film respects the farmers enough to let them call him a liar to his face. The real center is Xu Yingzhe, a poor farmer's son who does the hardest thing available to him: he actually listens, and tries to understand the numbers the adults have already dismissed. There is no spectacle here, no villain, just occupation-era Taiwan and the unglamorous math of making land drinkable. Slept on for a reason nobody should accept. Watch it for the kid who decided to believe something before it was safe to.

In 1917, Taiwan is under Japanese rule, and the Chianan Plain suffers through drought and famine. Residents live in poverty, and each day is spent hauling water back home. Then Yoichi Hatta arrives, a Japanese civil engineer with a bold plan to overhaul the region's irrigation. The locals are quick to brand him a liar. Xu Yingzhe, son of a poor farmer, objects to their flat refusal and tries to reason through what is happening. Hatta's idea may sound mad, yet it could ease the hard lives of the Taiwanese people. The film draws on the real life of the engineer Hatta Yoichi.