Da Xi Yang

Watching DA XI YANG is akin to looking through a human-sized kaleidoscope showing an exact image of the present, at once fragmented and fascinatingly confusing. The journey begins with a young man accidentally boiling a shark alive in a supermarket fish tank (based on a true story!) and falling into an adventure between different ages and places reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Searching for his long lost father through the traces of his past life, he comes across a sound artist from his hometown who is trying to recreate destroyed sites through their echoes and a Japanese manga artist who is also a tiger. Zhong Kaifeng’s debut feature digs deeper and deeper into the idea that the ultimate mystery is the existence of others, both in terms of the soul and of the senses. In attempting to grasp what is not the I, he explores different celluloid formats, textures and relationships to sound and image. Both the recent and not-so-recent past come to life in a film which realises that, as time moves forward into the future and we become ever more intertwined with technologies of every kind, the past feels and looks ever further away. Even 2005 can feel like a time of obsolete technology. (Lucía Salas)

In the presence of Zhong Kaifeng.