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From Dark Matters

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Country/Region: Mainland China

Release Year: 2020

Story:
Reading a voice from a grandmother's moment of insomnia, the film traces the reconstruction of a personal memory in this moment and its transient stagnation. The film attempts to reconstruct the forgotten and marginalised parts of the individual in time, and to extend the expression beyond the visual image to the dimension of reality, by roaming inside the body of the image, completing multiple jumps back and forth between positive and negative shapes, to reach the obscure place of memory.

Casts & Crews:

SHEN Ruilan
Directors

Runtime: 18 minutes

Language: Suzhou Dialect

Subtitles: Chinese, English

Douban:

https://movie.douban.com/subject/35371046/

Tags: #China, #Hangzhou, #Experimental

Director‘s Statement:

I started to look for the relationship between space, light and memory. At that time, I shot this film basically with my mobile phone, after enlarging the image taken by my iPhone. It will have a blurred feeling, which I think is very close to my own understanding of memory. The content of this film is probably based on the voice that my grandmother sent me, visualising the memories that she described and turning them into this kind of image that seems to be in my mind as well. At the time, my grandmother was sending me the kind of 60-second voices that old people often send, which I usually don't listen to, but by chance, I had the opportunity to listen to them all in one go, maybe a dozen of them, and I realised that my grandmother had been giving me fragmented messages about how, for example, when she went to this place today, she remembered what this place was like when she was a child.

I suddenly realised that after reaching her age, her understanding of memory was completely different from that of us youngsters. However, she didn't always remember, it was only when she recalled the past in her old age that she remembered. I think perhaps when people reach a certain state of life, perhaps like my grandmother who is in her eighties, when she starts to remember her life, something very deep in her memory will come out, and then she will have to taste those things again and again.

Based on this origin, I made this film because I wanted to try to get closer to my grandmother's memories, and then I wanted to make this image like a memory maze, where the audience can walk and feel those very trivial moments over and over again. For example, whether it's my grandmother or me, there must be some moments that are like a shimmering light in the darkness that supports us to understand life and feel it. The things I shot at the West Lake, the state of the people, the shimmering light, I used the image of "water" to connect them with my memories and my grandmother's memories.