Shards

In Shards, we attempt to return to the very core of my perception of realist film and filmmaking: the retelling of reality. We place the camera so it records what happens, we tell a story that is raw, and genuine, and we make this process-genre-film to challenge the sort of condescension that is so common in romantic, well-intentioned depictions. In this film, a refined true story is told with a neutral gaze throughout, capturing a family reunion during the COVID-19 pandemic full of mundane conversations and events: making rice balls, folding golden papers into ingots, worshiping ancestors… The film is modest because it is not picturesque in the familiar ways. And that is because they are so rigorously processual, on what it is to actually make something; on what it is to follow through on a series of steps involved in the process. As argued in Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky’s book The Process Genre, there is a set of aesthetics in the labor, the process of an event, for which often only the results are shown in films. In today’s post-pandemic society, people seem to quickly forget what humanity had been through. We start to become used to new social norms and power dynamics, especially in China. People ignore the underlying oppressive nature of the quarantine and start to seek new ways to gain social security. Shards provides a good example of the revival of clanism in China, where people try to protect the integrity of their families against social and political forces that drive them apart.