February

“Win Coffee” — grabbing a last Timmy’s per tradition at YYZ – PEK. Words to live by. See ya, TO.

March

Night ferry, Hong Kong harbor.

April

Back in China. Red lanterns sway; Red towers dreams slay.

May

It is a long road ahead but at least it’s a nice stride.

June

In the heat of the day, noon of the hour, there is always room for you under my pink umbrella.

July

Waiting for a streetcar that never comes.

August

Shimmering greens sprinkle droplets of laughters beneath a pale moon. Smoky, glorious summer nights.

September

What would have been.

October

Safe

November

The road home is littered with premature holiday cheer and lonely taxi cabs. A girl in shaggy boots cries into her phone at a green light. This year, winter is late.

December

Sit me down, shut me up, I’ll calm down, and I’ll get along with you

(ok, one more time)

Somewhere in southern Ontario, in the midst of a frozen parking lot on an early winter evening, there existed the most beautiful sunset.

Entire sheets of sky washed in throbbing ambers, golden pinks, and exquisite violets. Expanding, stretching, over masses of metal cubes that lay dormant below. Deserted shopping carts tremble in the wind. Dark figures huddled in layers of black shuffle slowly toward alien-size concrete structures. Street lamps suddenly appear, like rescue beacons on a forgotten mission, flood lights after a finished game; Except they stand in a field instead of a street, guarding temporary passages in place of permanent fixtures. Everything is fleeting. The silence is deafening. Humongous words glow with concepts of our collective destiny: Home, Food, Beyond… There is nowhere to be and no one to tell. The moment is beautiful. It was there and then it was gone.

Werner Herzog’s INTO THE ABYSS, Ann Hui’s A SIMPLE LIFE, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s THIS IS NOT A FILM, Steve McQueen’s SHAME — all examples of masters at work who are fully in control of their craft, even in dire circumstances.

Here are my brief thoughts on the four films in Part II of my article for UK’s The Spectator Arts Blog. Two are exerpted below.

THIS IS NOT A FILM

Dir. Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

The sentence of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi on December 20, 2010 to six years in prison and twenty-year ban on filmmaking and interviews shocked the world cinema community, and triggered the making of This is not a Film – an honest document of a day in the life of a filmmaker deprived of his right to make a film, and an urgent cry from an artist who refuse to be silenced.

Under house arrest, the day begins at Panahi’s kitchen table where he speaks into the camera directly. Unsatisfied with his efforts, he recruits Mirtahmasb who joins him for the day. Throughout their time together, Panahi constantly checks on the status of his case while firmly holding onto his craft. He watches his old films, talks about the new one he wants to make, and demonstrates using scotch tape on his living room carpet the set he intends to build.  The result is both heartbreaking and mesmerizing. Panahi’s anxiety of his deprivation is clearly evident, and they overwhelm him at times. To see a grown man break down is hard. To see a grown filmmaker who breaks down because he cannot make a film is a sentence that I never want to say aloud.

Panahi works with resources available to him: an iPhone, a camera, his pet lizard, and even the young man who comes to collect the garbage. His paces may be restricted, but his instincts wander. As we follow Panahi and his hand-held camera to the last frame, we see what he sees: a metal gate that he cannot physically step beyond. Thankfully, with the support of the international film community, his film can go where he cannot, and proves once again that an artist cannot, should not, and will not be silenced.

SHAME

Dir. Steve McQueen

From its first frame to its last, SHAME is a precise and lyrical account of one man’s muffled cry in the city that dreams are made of. Set in New York in the life of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), Steve McQueen delves into all of the man’s wounds – emotional, physical, sexual – and does so with fierce determination and unflinching focus.

Brandon is addicted to sex, we are held to observe. Brandon is deteriorating to pieces, we are guided along his descent. No look is gratuitous. Every shot is crafted with weight and precision, set to a tremendous score of matching emotional amplification. Same goes for Sissy (Carey Mulligan), Brandon’s sister, who is opposite in demeanour but no less of a mess than her co-sufferer. Like two caged animals Brandon and Sissy are drawn and repulsed by each other, simultaneously tied by their past and tormented by their present, each struggling to survive in a city built on glass and steel, where money buys you dry martinis at high places, but never shelter from the darkness twisting within.

In the critically acclaimed HUNGER, McQueen and Fassbender announced to the world the astonishing potential of their creative collaboration. Here, the addition of Mulligan forms a sort of powerful trifecta: as the boy and girl despair, search,  hurt and be hurt, the camera stays close and watches in tender yearning, and so do we.

… Continue reading INTO THE ABYSS and A SIMPLE LIFE on The Spectator Arts Blog

… where the sky is low.

And everything seems almost, just, within reach.

Inhale.

Press down the shutter and keep it open. Expose. Expose. Be kind. Be strong. Be patient.

Let go, when it feels right.

Exhale.

It is not always that simple. It is that simple.

Sometimes, it can be magical.

It was about 23 hours ago.

I sat down on a bench made out of twisted wood in a lobby beside a coffee shop.

Smell of fresh ground espresso wafted out from the ajar door. I was content in the aftermath of warm chaos.

Something made me turn around, and on the concrete lining of a flower bed behind, I saw it.

A tiny, almost translucent creature, moving silently across the smooth surface at ease.

Where was it going? Where did it come from? What does it want to do with its life?

The road is vast. Not an obstacle in sight.

I put my coffee cup on the concrete — directly in front of it.

Then, I picked up my iPhone and turned on the camera.

This is not world-class discovery channel material. This is personal.

There was curiosity, confusion, hesitation, exploration, temptation, and action.

In the end, there was survival.

That is life on the edge: when push comes to shove, there is nowhere to go but up.

You know.

October 13, 2011, approximately 4:30pm. Toronto.

Before, I went to a meeting, stocked up on my favorite coffee, picked up a new cheese and ridiculously cheap fresh tomatoes.

After, I went to sushi with a friend.

But right then, in those four minutes and twenty-six seconds, something changed in me.

It is tangible, and I like the taste.

Well, none taken by me anyway.

Here is a very belated write-up on the Festival for UK’s The Spectator Arts Blog. If last year was a whirlwind, this year was a delicious blur. Immediately post-TIFF I got thrown into another pile of work, and then it seemed a stretch to recap on something more than two weeks old in the Fall film festival circuit. Though when Scott Harris, the editor at The Spectator Arts Blog, asked me to do a piece for them, I was happy to have an excuse to reminisce about some of my favorite cinematic highlights from this year’s TIFF, where I worked closely as Programming Associate for Cameron Bailey from summer leading up and through the festival.

Due to word limits the article is divided into a short series. Part 1 consists of a general intro and a capsule review of WUTHERING HEIGHTS, directed by the incomparable Andrea Arnolds, who in her unabashedly poetic ways, through her gloriously passionate lens, remains one of my favorite directors working today.

Wuthering Heights
Dir. Andrea Arnold

A timeless classic and a tragic love story of haunting proportions, Wuthering Heights has been criticized, analyzed, and adapted in many forms ever since its birth. Here, the incomparable Andrea Arnold bravely takes on the challenge and creates an effervescent take on the age-old tale of forbidden passion and doomed affair. Almost entirely devoid of a soundtrack, the film breathes with the damp, howling winds of Yorkshire moors and finds pockets of shimmering poetry in between the blows.

Shot on handheld cameras that sway and dart with the vague passions of youth, every look is captured; every touch felt, buried in wet black mud and carried on feathers of a bird in the wind. Emotions radiate instead of announce. Silences carry notes of tremendous repertoire. To say the cinematography by Arnold’s long-time DP Robbie Ryan is pure poetry is an understatement.

Following her gritty and uncompromising portrayal of fitful passions in Red Road and Fish Tank, Arnold goes even further here. Refusing the aid of sweeping score and elegant speech, she strips a classic tale down to its bones: where anguish floods, regret foams, love survives, but choices made in moments of youth cut eternal, and can never be undone.

Click here to read full article on The Spectator Arts Blog

－ 贾樟柯，《贾想 1996－2008》

Last week a note quietly awaited me on a humid summer afternoon. It was from the post office. It said I had a package to pick up. Assuming that was a dvd held up during the postal strike, I casted it aside. Almost a week later, the note caught the corner of my eye as I was dashing out the door. There it was, buried under a pile of unopened mail, still. Imagine my surprise when the postal lady dropped a large cardboard box onto the counter with a heavy thud. It was the box of Chinese books that I hurriedly shipped during my last week in BeiJing: poetry collections, classic literature, cinema handbooks, and various randomness that I swam in, finally arriving after months at sea.

Among them was a film diary by Jia ZhangKe, “贾想”, or “Jia’s Thoughts.”

Buried under screeners of late, I flipped through the book as I came up for air from time to time, letting my fingers wander through pages they land on. It is a modest size – around 260 pages. A soft cover shows Jia dressed in black and holding his left hand over his face. A white cup sits in front. He could be both in peace and frustration.

Still, life goes on. Work seems endless as TIFF looms closer. The increasing responsibilities both invigorate and exhaust me. I live in plots, narratives, long shots and rough cuts. I live for those moments of sheer clarity amongst seas of mishaps. I can’t decide whether my attention span is growing shorter or longer.

Then, in the aftermath of a long day, in the midnight hours, I watched Jia’s STILL LIFE (2006).

So much space.

Around those sweaty torsos and tired faces, incomprehensible changes are taking place: a two thousand year old city is being demolished; a million people being relocated; an UFO flashes across the sky; a man walks on air. Those are strange times. This is a strange land.

And yet, familiar. As I followed the camera my insides grew damp. That hollow in between my chest and gut grew heavy, as if the worries, fears, responsibilities and apprehension of every face that passed before the camera wandered through the lens and into the hollows in me.

淡淡的忧愁， 深深的无奈。

Those faces reminded me of the faces I saw in China this spring… The ones making pancakes in the morning. The ones dancing salsa in the afternoon.

Those faces reminded me of me.

So much space. So many changes.

Two bullet trains collided in Eastern China this weekend, killing 43 and injuring 210. A day earlier, 41 people were killed in an overloaded bus in Henan province. A few weeks ago an escalator at a BeiJing subway station collapsed. Last week alone four bridges crumpled in various parts of the country. Then there is the fake milk powders for babies and the chemically soaked fake jade bracelets sold to the elderly. Chinese twitter is awash with reports of irresponsible operations. Chinese people are crying for China to wait in its frantic steps — to wait for its people, its soul, its morality, its conscience — cries that are echoed in the New York Times Sunday papers, but who is listening?

The news exhaust me these days. Listening to those numbers, I suddenly feel so old.

夜深暑愁独不眠，幽灯把盏沉尘默。

清月撒玉揉心寒，扇飞吹起丝思情。

Pine in the night. Silk in my hands.

A few days after I left China, while lying in a strange hotel room in a strange city, I got an email from my aunt, a round-faced, bright-eyed woman who looks young enough to be my sister, as I like to tell her. She is an art critic in BeiJing, and perhaps because of that common difference the two of us understood each other right away. The last time we met I was a little kid. This time, I was not.

She sent me a link to her blog entry about our day together at art district 798. I’d had a particularly hard night before. She was caring. We had a nice time, though I felt very much alone. Reading under the covers on my phone in the dark, I again got that damp feeling.

As I finished the last line, I felt the wetness breathing against my stubborn lashes, my hot cheeks.

I blinked hard and tapped through the fog:

虹姐,

望我可以永远做你笔下那个有梦想撒娇好看的女孩。

妹倩

Still life.

Still is the carving of time. Alive are the memories carried within.

A man. A lone sax. A church.

Guttural and unrelenting, Colin Stetson‘s sounds crashed forward and took command: at times a distant siren’s call and others a rumbling thunder, it was an all-consuming affair that pelted you to the pews.

The Stars In His Head… From No Part Of Me Could I Summon A Voice, Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes. Red Horse racing Home, with A Dream Of Water and Fear Of The Unknown And The Blazing Sun. Judges, The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man Clothed In The Skin Of The Dead. All The Colors Bleached to White as All The Days I’ve Missed You.

In Love And In Justice.

Awake On Foreign Shores.