neversayneverbird

Yan Zhengfan's "Stranger" is an excellent piece of filmmaking. Catch it at a local festival if you can. It's a meditation on belonging and, especially, non-belonging (which, I guess, is partly what appealed so much to me). If you are fascinated by the strangeness of in-between places (the limbo of hotel rooms), if you like staring into someone else's windows where lives unfold and squeeze back shut, you will enjoy Yan Zhengfan's work just like I did. As one of the characters puts it: "The new place never becomes familiar, while the old place continues to grow stranger." I caught some echoes of other excellent contemporary Chinese auteurs in the director's style: Jia Zhangke's unhurried pacing, Diao Yi'nan's moodiness (and yes, the fondness for shabby hotel rooms), Bi Gan's dream-like exploration of the background settings almost as vivid as characters themselves. Yet I felt that the film held its own very well. Highly recommended.

I can't believe this one is a mere 6.1 on here. Sure, the show does have a big problem: namely, that the first three episodes or so seem like they've come from a different series altogether. Some of the worst cliches of BL pop up without it being made clear whether those are used ironically; the paranormal detective plot is slow-going... And then, suddenly, the show shifts its gears and becomes something much more complex, layered, and exciting, giving new depth to the characters and exploring the issues of trauma, trust, and human fallibility. The problem is that it takes too long for the show to get there, and some of the viewers might abandon it before the concept is truly allowed to blossom. Give this one a chance, and your patience will be rewarded. I ended up really enjoying it in the end. A solid 8 from me.

Art College 1994 tells a story of a group of friends studying at an unnamed art school in the early 90s China. They go through their everyday lives as people in their early twenties tend to anywhere in the world: being brave, lazy, and foolish; questioning the meaning of life and the meaning of art; falling in love and experiencing heartbreak; dreaming of possible and impossible futures; drinking beer; listening to music; laughing; throwing stones into the river.

All of this is captured lovingly and in incredible detail by the director and his visual team. Every frame is a masterpiece full of carefully rendered details: from crumpled papers in the grass, to peeling posters on the walls, to an old mop leaning in the corner. Although the city where the story takes place is not specified, anyone familiar with Nanjing will easily recognize its iconic views recreated beautifully on screen: from glimpses of the Sacred Way of the Ming Mausoleum to the silhouette of the Purple Mountain looming in the background. The characters hang out at the shores of Zixia lake and on the Yangtze River Bridge. The 'art college' in the title is modelled on the School of Arts of Nanjing University.

This visual feast, however, is only one of the film's strengths. The characters - goofy, talented, hapless, eccentric - are memorable and relatable. We share their joys and sorrows and desperately hope that they will make it, sane and unharmed, through the mess of young adulthood. One of the greatest gifts of this film is that you don't need to have a particular interest in China or in the world of art to enjoy it (even though either or both will help to provide a bit more context to the action and conversation on screen). The main thing you need is to remember what those summer nights out drinking with friends felt like, and how the coming dawn could leave you tittering on the edge of the abyss of the tomorrow you were too scared to face. Capturing these fragile, fleeting moments is a remarkable achievement of the creative team behind Art College 1994.

I hope more people will get a chance to immerse themselves in this film's lovingly constructed universe: a bubble of time and place miraculously rescued from the great rush of changes that China's next three decades would bring. It's such a special space - the one I'm certain to revisit.