Can the farmers speak? The paradox of the subaltern narrative in Return to Dust

This article examines 隐入尘烟 Yinru Chenyan ‘Return to Dust’ (2022) (henchforth Dust), directed by Li Ruijun, as a powerful critique of rural marginalization and socio-economic inequities in contemporary China. The film illustrates the hardships faced by Ma Youtie and Cao Guiying, representing rural individuals marginalized by prevailing urban narratives and enduring institutional neglect and exploitation. Using narrative analysis and building on the surrounding paratextual film reviews of Dust, this study engages the notion of subalternity to reveal how the film amplifies the voices of rural communities through narrating about three disparate subaltern subjects: the peasants; the marginalized in the rural society; the rural women. Then, through examining the film reviews from state-sponsored media and social media, this paper explores how the subaltern narrative engenders an ideological confrontation between the state-sponsored media discourse and the grassroots discourse from the rural communities. Although the subaltern narrative may be misrepresented as a series of positive messages by state-sponsored media, it concurrently possesses the capacity to provoke public critique of both films and state-sponsored media on social media platforms, advocating for more just representations of social responsibility.