Bi Gan | China 2015, 113 minutes | 7pm, Monday 18 July
In Kaili Blues, memory is visceral, and a near-hallucination.
– Ela Bittencourt, Slant Magazine
Kaili, Guizhou Province, China. In a small clinic, two preoccupied doctors live like ghosts until one day, Chen Sheng decides to fulfil his dead mother’s wish and sets off on a long train journey to look for his brother’s abandoned child. His partner at the clinic, a lonely old lady, asks him to bring an old photograph, a shirt and a cassette to her old sweetheart who has fallen ill. On the way, Chen passes a strange little town named Dangmai where time is not linear and people’s lives complement each other. Compelled to stops there, he experiences the past, present and future…
Shot in the Guizhou, the centre of Miao culture, Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues is a striking debut that manages to blend the styles of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Andrei Tarkovsky. And,in an astonishing 40-minute take that dissolves time in its exploration of a village, it suggests a world of new filmmaking avenues.
D Gan Bi S Gan Bi P Jianguo Ding, Zijian Wang, Shen Yang, Li Zhaoyu and Shan Zonglong
C Tianxing Wang E Yanan Qin
Language: Chinese with English Subtitles
Distribution: China Film International DCP
Unrated 15+
Winner of Best Emerging Director at Locarno 2015 and Best New Director at the 2015 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards.