Published on July 2, 2024 at 3:57 p.m. / Modified on July 2, 2024 at 3:58 p.m.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this: an exciting young author from mainland China. Since connoisseurs stopped counting them by generation (Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang for the 5th, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai and Wang Bing for the 6th), we had lost track, almost resigned to the fact that nothing would escape the grip of Chinese censorship and its unexportable national(ist) cinema. Wrong! Because nothing stops the freedom to create when imperious desire and indisputable talent are coupled with a certain skill. After Li Ruijun and his memorable rural drama The Return of the Swallows (2022), here is a newcomer, born in Beijing in 1991 and with impressive artistic maturity: Wei Shujun, already selected four times at Cannes.
In 2018, his short film On the Border, about a young man of Korean origin aspiring to join “enemy” South Korea, was already an award-winner. In 2020, his first feature film Striding Into the Wind, portrait of a young rebel as an apprentice filmmaker, was included in the selection of a cancelled edition. And now an adventurous distributor, Sister Distribution, has the good idea of introducing us to his second and third feature films: Ripples of Life (Directors’ Fortnight, 2021) and Only the River Flows (Un Certain Regard, 2023). Since then, the indomitable prodigy has already made two films.
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