N/A
Somewhere in the world there is a remote island. The sea. Lush hills. The impenetrable forest. The constantly changing weather. In a lodge by the sea, a Chinese writer immersing herself in reading and writing encounters a Japanese girl who is in a melancholic mood. Night after night some dreams lull them into sleep, but a heavy heart is lost in deep thoughts. What has actually happened and what the two girls are feeling, imagining or remembering starts to overlap.
Manipulated film stocks frame a love story in vivid and vibrant abstract greens, purples, pinks and blues. Wei plays with absence and presence, human and landscape, through fragmented images and dialogue exploring the agency of objects and the reliability of the image. Simultaneously inviting and elusive, the film is a beautiful questioning of storytelling, image-making, authorship and perspective.
A transcendental meditation on withered trees struggling to be reborn. A fleeting glimpse into the seemingly trivial occurrences of daily life. A sheer ecstasy of physical intimacy viewed through celluloid films, in which the life of the emulsion is decaying: during the lockdown, film footages were “disinfected” by disinfectant, surface cleanser and hand sanitiser gel, specifically, household chemicals which were alleged to “kill 99.9% of bacteria and viruses”, and which helped us prevent the spread of coronavirus. Returning images that have shapes to the shapeless, in the physical fragility of the cinematic medium, allows for the viewer’s hallucinatory perception of matter in a state of continual creation and dissolution.
This powerful documentary explores the cruel realities of sweatshop labor and workplace injury in China, and one lawyer's mission to defend worker's rights.
