Image of movie Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish
Image of movie Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish
Image of movie Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish
Features

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

Lei Lei
Netherlands, United States 2022
104 min
V'22

The father and the grandfather speak in voiceover, their accounts complementing one another as they tell the grandson, the filmmaker, the story of the family. They speak with forbearance and composure, although the story they tell is hardly a happy one, an account of tenderness and caring, but also of separation, bereavement, forced relocation, ridicule, reeducation, censorship, hardship; it is the story of China in the 20th century too. In creating images to narrate this story, the filmmaker takes his bearings as much from its immutable stations as from the fluidity of memory, whereby individual recollection is always collective too. Propaganda materials thus deliver motifs and backdrops alike, populated with bright colors, malleable figures and fantastical creatures as shifting and surreal as the times they represent, while lurid plasticine faces breathe strange new life into family photographs and can be flattened out and reshaped as needed, just like in real life. Perhaps the best way to deal with such trauma is to transform it into endless flights of fancy, all silver birds and rainbow fish, untethered, unbound. If history boxes in and makes rigid, liberation lies in how you look back, in blissful pliability. (James Lattimer)

Lei Lei: MAGIC CUBE AND PING-PONG (2009, K), THIS IS LOVE (2010, K), RECYCLED (2013, K), BIG HANDS OH BIG HANDS, LET IT BE BIGGER AND BIGGER (2013, K), HAND COLORED NO. 2 (2015, K, Ko-Regie), THIS IS NOT A TIME TO LIE (2016, K), BOOKS ON BOOKS (2016, K), MISSING ONE PLAYER (2016, K), BREATHLESS ANIMALS (2019), A BRIGHT SUMMER DIARY (2020, K), NINGDU (2021)

Credits
  • Lei Lei
  • Tessa Rose Jackson
  • Darius Timmer
  • Lei Lei
  • Patrick Minks
  • Tessa Rose Jackson
  • Darius Timmer
C-Ray Studio, Chinese Shadows, Submarine Film

Asian Shadows

DCP
Farbe
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