SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE
The screening includes an introduction from director Jia Zhang-ke.
Director: Jia Zhang-ke
112mins, China, 2020, Subtitled, Colour, Documentary
World Premiere, Berlin International Film Festival 2020
Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke (Platform; A Touch of Sin; Ash is Purest White) has spent the last decade exploring social and historical dimensions of China through fiction. Here he returns to his native province, Shanxi to the Jia Family Village, in a documentary about China’s modern writers, part of a trilogy of ‘spiritual portraits’.
‘Structured casually as flowing clouds’, the story is told through memories of the late writer-activist Ma Feng whose most creative period was the 17 years prior to the Cultural Revolution; testimonies of major contemporary writers, Jia Pingwa (born in the 1950s) focuses on the ‘Cultural Revolution’ and its aftermath; Yu Hua (born in the 1960s) speaks about China’s ‘reform and opening up’ period; and Liang Hong (born in the 1970s), whose work coincides with the present.
Beautifully shot, feelings are triggered by words, archive footage and contemporary images of people. A moving journey through words, framed faces and landscapes, city crowds, montages of the new world of megacities and people modern life, where ‘writing poetry doesn’t mean living a poetic life’.
Notes by Marie-Pierre Richard.
