fiction / 2018 / China / col. / 115 min.
The hypnotic romanticising neo noir creation of Gan Bi, the most gifted of the contemporary Chinese film-makers, is a magical meditation on space and time, an enigmatic cinematic poem about loss and suffering, a dream woven from unreliable memories, melancholically blurred by the present and the past, which might not even have been. The mesmerising rhythm and the doleful images of the film about a man seeking his long-lost love, evokes the more sombre and more abstracts early movies of Wong Kar-Wai, as well as Andrey Tarkovsky’s mature pieces. Following the hero as he wanders the dreamlike ruins of the provincial town of Kaili in southwest China, the feature culminates in an almost hour-long uninterrupted revelatory take in 3D.
Director: Gan Bi
Screenplay: Gan Bi
Photography: David Chizallet, Jingsong Dong, Hung-i Yao
Editor: Yanan Qin
Music: Chih-Yuan Hsu, Lim Giong
Cast: Sylvia Chang, Yongzhong Chen, Jue Huang, Hong-Chi Lee, Meng Li, Wei Tang, Meihuizi Zeng