Official Selection - Out of Competition 2017 / Qing song jia yu kuai / Hong Kong 2016
A door-to-door soap salesman comes to a sparsely populated village in northern China. With his arrival, however, the number of bizarre attacks on the local population increases. Laced with a considerable dose of black humor, the movie offers an unusually entertaining and uncompromising sketch of Chinese society today.
A door-to-door soap seller arrives in a nearly deserted village in the middle of the barren landscape of northern China. But he’s not the only one strolling its desolate paths. Quirky individuals abound: a Kung Fu master, a Hindu monk, a devout believer, a ranger, and two policemen investigating the rise in uncanny attacks on the local inhabitants. Their lives interconnect in a web of incredible and absurd encounters that gradually reveal the characters’ true selves and sow the seeds of mistrust, although they also create unexpected connections. Laced with a generous dose of black humor and grounded in perfectionist attention to mise-en-scène, the picture offers an unusually entertaining yet penetrating look at postindustrial China. The movie also touches on themes of belief and dignity while drawing an uncompromising sketch of China’s rural environment and Chinese society as a whole. For its unique vision the film deservedly took away the Special Jury Prize from the international competition at this year’s Sundance festival.
Hubert Poul
98 min / Color, DCP
European premiere
Director Jun Geng
/ Screenplay Liu Bing, Feng Yu hua, Jun Geng
/ Dir. of Photography Wang Weihua
/ Editor Guo Xiaodong, Zhong Yijuan
/ Producer Wang Zijian, Wang Xuebo, Xie Meng
/ Production Blackfin Production Company
/ Cast Xu Gang, Zhang Zhiyong, Xue Baohe, Wang Xuxu, Gu Benbin, Zhang Xun, Yuan Liguo
/ Sales Stray Dogs
Jun Geng (b. 1976, Hegang, China) is an independent filmmaker with a number of features to his credit. The most deserving of notice is Youth (Qingnian, 2009), screened at the Rome Film Fest, where the filmmaker was nominated for the Marc’Aurelio of the Future Award for most promising foreign director. His filmography also includes Hawthorn (2002), Diary in Bulk (2003), Barbecue (2004), Poetry and Disease (2011), and The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping (2013). An established creative team – DOP, sound designer, and several actors – has worked on the majority of his films. Free and Easy premiered in this year’s international competition at Sundance.
Stray Dogs
6 rue du 8 mai 1945, 75010, Paris
France
Phone: +33 (0)1 42 41 31 80
E-mail: [email protected]
Jun Geng
Film Director
Wu Jie
Lison Hervé
Festival Organizer
First-hand brews throughout the year.
Be among the first to learn about upcoming events and other news. We only send the newsletter when we have something to say.
