Shen Ruilan

An old lady in deep sleep, back in time, dreaming of her past lover...

I remember that I once tried to go far away to be a monk again. I didn’t know which temple to go to. I just wanted to find a temple. So, I choose another direction instead of going to the city. I walked from 4pm to 8 pm, it was gradually getting darker. With cars coming and going, I started walking aimlessly on the road…’ It is a project of a tracking record about a young man who planned to be a monk after 108 days. I got involved in the life of the protagonist, influenced some of his choices, and then I attempted to utilize subjective monologue to construct a narrative, coupled with his personal situation, his experience in the journey and his surroundings. ‘The Cassock’ is an intersection between the truly recorded video and non-fictional phone text. My interference of the events and supposition of its future progression are also included.

The film documents a trip that the filmmaker took with her parents. Both in their sixties, they had lived their lives in rural areas and never seen the sea. Thanks to the film, she had the opportunity to take her parents to the seaside. She found the island closest to home, Weizhou Island, and asked a photographer to film this trip. Different layers of reality — her parent’s fear of modern society, the daughter’s doubt about her own motivations, and the photographer’s change from an impartial documentarian to an emotional participant — emerged together. In the course of this short trip, the filmmaker started to reflect on art, family, and self, all through the recorded images.

An intimate reading experience of voice messages from my grandmother‘s sleepless moments. A portrait of personal memory as it is reimagined and lingers for an instant. My phone camera documents wandering figures by a lakeside at night. Across from the lake, the sight of the dissolving cityscape appears to be both infinitely close and extremely remote. This film attempts to reconstruct the forgotten and the marginalized parts of individual beings in the scope of time. The film explores what’s beyond the visual expression and flows out of the flat screen to co-inhabit the space of the audience’s reality. The viewers would find themselves roaming through the ontological existence of film, confronted with sound, light, darkness, time and rhythms, transitioning between positive space and negative space, and approaching the very ambiguity of memory.

Pursuing a lost train, I drive myself into my own memory where a train attendant wants to extricate himself from a worldly life. Like wind passing by, he appears in my life briefly. When I look into his phantom, I realize that the people and landscape are reshaped and its images become unforeseen.

On a summer evening, among the ruins, three young men, played with fireworks.

The animation is about a letter from a south city. The inspiration comes from senior from my hometown, who talks about the description and fantasy about the last decade. Combined with the odd stories, the movie depicts the status of a coming night. Before everything occurs, there are only hints, metaphors, and the urge in the dark night. At that time, people in my hometown could not tell some of the truth, and they lived with tense relationships between them. Then some incidents evolved into bizarre legends. Now, the light in the city has driven away the darkness in the countryside, while those legends still exist there.