Type: Film Scree
ning and Discussion
Speaker: Yang Chao (director of t
he Silver Bear award winner at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and the lat
est work\, CROSSCURRENT長江圖)
“The core o
f the film is surreal\, almost supernatural—a man and a woman from a differ
ent time and space travel against each other\, progressively and retrogress
ively at the same.”
– Yang Chao
It has been over ten years since Beijing Film Academy graduate Yang Chao’s last feature film Passages (2004)\, but the wait was more than worth it. Poetic\, enigmatic and achingly beautiful\, this long-awaited ma sterpiece opens new directions for Chinese cinema.
Gao Chun (Qin Hao) is a young captain hired to take a small cargo ship up the Yangtze River. One day he finds a handwritten book of poetry hidden in the boat. The namel ess poet’s abstrusely beautiful texts work their way into Gao’s soul. He di sembarks at every port on his journey\, and at each landing he has a vision of a mysterious woman\, An Lu (newcomer Xin Zhilei)… or is it perhaps a se ries of women\, issued from a magical alchemy the poems provoke inside his imagination? Their encounters become increasingly intimate\, but once the s hip passes the Three Gorges Dam she disappears.
“The great cinema
tographer Mark Lee Ping-bin works with Yang to create landscapes of overwhe
lming beauty: their choice of 35mm film produces radiant\, light-infused im
ages of palpable power and unlimited depth. Sensuality made visible: a triu
mph of cinematic art.”
— Shelly Kraicer
Best Cinematography\, Berlin 16