His earlier movies like 2010’s The Old Donkey or 2012’s Fly with the Crane were set in the same remote region, an area even most Chinese film-goers are not too familiar with. “Rarely do audiences get to see the lives and the people around Gaotai,” Li says.

When we speak over Zoom, it’s the tail end of Lunar New Year. Li is holed up in a hotel in his homeland, the wiry-looking 39 year-old dressed in a creased white T-shirt and trousers. Return to Dust has just premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in competition – Li’s first time competing for the Golden Bear.

A gentle, soulful story of simple folk, at the core of Return to Dust is Ma (Wu Renlin), a kindly fellow who treats everything with tenderness.

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“Ma is a child of the land, a child of the soil,” says Li. “Just like the land gives everyone undifferentiated love … Ma also loves people around him without any differentiation.”

In particular, he treats his spouse, Cao (Hai Qing), with utmost dignity, unlike others around her. All her life, she’s been bullied and beaten; she can’t even control her bladder, frequently wetting herself.

As Return to Dust unfolds, their relationship takes centre stage, as they survive harsh conditions – even the demolition of their old home as part of a scheme to improve rural living standards, which means they must build a new residence.

Li sees this couple as kindred spirits on the fringes of society. “They belong to the same living class because their living environment and their fates are very similar,” suggests Li, “so they have empathy for each other.”

Although politics is kept at bay in the film, Li does explore how encroaching urbanisation has a great impact on Ma and Cao’s lives.

“I believe that this is a global trend, urbanisation, because in this time of globalisation, and this time of modernisation, villages are getting bigger and towns are getting bigger,” the director says. “Maybe villages are turning into towns and towns turning into cities. So this is a trend that is unstoppable.”

Sadly, travel curbs because of the coronavirus pandemic meant neither he nor his team could travel to the Berlin festival – the latest issue he has had to face in what’s been an arduous process to get the film made.

“It took me one year to write, one year to make, one year post-production. And of course, this one has a financial challenge too, because of the pandemic – a lot of films cannot be shown in the cinemas.”

That brief summary, almost casual in its delivery, doesn’t begin to explain the challenges Li endured, with a shoot split into five parts that spanned eight months between March and October 2020.

It was the longest shoot he has ever faced, and there was also no fakery going on. Crops and animals needed to be cared for, as if they were real farmers working the land. Li is also credited as the film’s art director and editor, saving valuable money for the budget.

The film is set to be released in China on February 25, though Li doesn’t sound so hopeful for its prospects. “The genre and the style of this film is not something very popular in terms of commercial potential,” he says. “The younger generation, I believe they like genre movies more.”

Ironically, Walking Past the Future – largely set in Shenzhen, the booming tech metropolis in southern China – was his attempt to steer his career towards the mainstream, and featured popular Chinese actress Yang Zishan as a factory worker.

Yet Li is clearly not a director who craves blockbuster success; his films have a homespun feel about them. Wu Renlin, who plays the role of Ma, is Li’s uncle, and his cousin also features in the film.

Li’s father and brother also helped out on set, planting crops and even constructing the house that Ma builds during the film. Made from mud bricks, baked in the sun, “that’s how people in that area build a house in their real life”, explains Li. “A house like that can be used for 30 or 40 years.”

To borrow a line from the film, “home-made is best every time”, and there’s a tension in Return to Dust between the old ways and the new. Ma – this child of the soil – is comfortable knee-deep in mud or scooping up a fish from a river and cooking it for he and Cao to eat.

“I made it very clear at the screenplay stage that nature is a very, very important part of the film,” says Li. Mother Nature, he adds, is key to our relationship to the world. “It’s about people’s way of living. It’s about how people build their relations with each other and how to build relations with nature.”

Just watching Wu in the film, it’s clear how capable he is out in the elements. “He’s a farmer himself in real life,” says Li. “So he’s very used to everything there.” Li tends to favour working with non-professionals, and the realism he draws from his leading man hugely benefits the film.

Although Return to Dust came away empty-handed at the Berlinale, the M. Night Shyamalan-led jury seeing fit to award its top prize, the Golden Bear, to another rural drama, Alcarras, a story of Catalan peach farmers, Li saw rights to his film bought by a number of European territories, including France and Portugal.

That in itself feels like a triumph, given his steadfast refusal to make genre movies. “It’s not easy to find investors for my films,” he admits.

Perhaps Return to Dust will finally see him break into the upper echelons of world cinema.