青红 | Shanghai Dreams

In the mid-1960s the Chinese government, fearing conflict with the Soviet Union, called for strategically important factories to be moved inland to form a “Third Line Of Defence”. Answering their country’s call, innumerable workers and their families left their homes in such large cities as Shanghai and Beijing and followed the factories to the barren terrain of western China. Set twenty years later, as the country begins to reform and open up to the rest of the world, Wang Xiaoshuai’s moving film tells the poignant tale of one such displaced family and the conflict that arises when 19 year old Qinghong finds love for the first time with a local boy, much to the disapproval of her father who dreams of returning his family to Shanghai.

Directed by Xiaoshuai Wang | Starring : Yuanyuan Gao, Bin Li, Hao Qin, Yang Tang, Anlian Yao | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, La Rochelle Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Oslo Film Festival, Indianapolis Film Festival, Alba Regia Film Festival

天边一朵云 | The Wayward Cloud

The most audacious film to date from visionary director Tsai Ming-liang, The Wayward Cloud is about a porn actor and the museum tour guide who enters into a strange relationship with him, unaware of his profession. Hsiao-kang is the same alienated youth whose chance encounter with Shiang-chyi provided the spark that fueled Tsai’s earlier films. Once again, these two lost souls cross paths—he now works as an actor in no-budget porn films, and she wanders around Taipei, hoarding bottles of water because of a serious drought. In fact, the government is recommending that people eat watermelons to hydrate themselves. This fruit sets in motion a perverse (and often hilarious) symbolic theme throughout much of the film. As in his earlier film The Hole, Tsai adds trashy, campy musical numbers into the narrative. These sequences play against the raw sex scenes, creating a bizarre, existential chaos. The filmmaker has created a perfectly realized alternative universe in his ongoing exploration of sex, bodies, and loneliness. His stationary camera perfectly illustrates the isolation and exploitation the characters are trapped in—yet the film is as funny as it is emotionally tortured. Tsai’s characters are indeed wayward clouds, drifting through life without purpose, in a world without water. And prepare yourself for the film’s unbelievable final scene, which manages to be both weirdly erotic and profoundly disturbing.

Directed by Ming-liang Tsai | Starring : Kang-sheng Lee, Shiang-chyi Chen, Yi-Ching Lu, Kuei-Mei Yang, Sumomo Yozakura | Presented at Berlin Film Festival, Brisbane Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, Sitges Film Festival, Stockholm Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, Nantes Film Festival, Alba Regia Film Festival, Helsinki Film Festival