North American Premiere
A 25-year-old gay man returns to his hometown in China after film school, and reflects how his coming out as gay affected (and continues to affect) his mother. Beautifully shot on 8mm and 16mm in a modernized Jonas Mekas-like personal diary style, Shuli Huang takes his time to craft mini-visual poems and a sense of place before addressing the heart of his work via voice over essayistic thoughts and revealing conversations with his mother. The tension between societal norms and individuals is obvious, but Huang also takes care to grant his parents personhood, documenting their little habits so that they become a subtext of the film as well. It’s a moving, brilliant film made by a man searching for hope and meaning in life, while wishing he and his mother could love each other as the other wishes.
Media Partner
Community Partner
Yunxue Yu, Kangmin Huang, Shuli Huang
China
2022
In Mandarin with English subtitles
Featured in:
International Shorts: Personal Journeys
The films in this shorts program are all about discovery. Beautiful and thought-provoking voyages of internal and external discovery that honour relations and history, while encountering stimuli that promote a new understanding of self.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Love
This warm, thoughtful piece offers shrewd comic observations on modern dating as it trains a quizzical eye on the trysts of a female doctor, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), and her colleague, a gay male nurse, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen).
Sex
Two chimney sweeps living in heterosexual marriages find their views on sexuality and gender challenged by a series of unexpected events. In a set of sharply scripted conversations, both men confront heretofore unexplored aspects of their identity.
3 Faces
Iranian filmmaker Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari, both playing themselves, receive a video in which a distraught teenaged girl, whose acting dreams have been quashed appears to kill herself. Panahi and Jafari decide to investigate...
Dreams
The third installment in the Sex/Dreams/Love trilogy is another rich, absorbing tale. 17-year-old Johanne writes a confessional about her flirtation with a (female) teacher. But the writing is too good to stay private...
Transit
Trust the director of Phoenix and Barbara to re-imagine a WWII romantic intrigue into something unsettlingly contemporary. With occupying forces closing in, a German refugee (Franz Rogowski) assumes a dead writer's identity and flees to Marseille.
Credits
Producer
Shuli Huang
Screenwriter
Shuli Huang
Cinematography
Shuli Huang
Editor
Yang Yang, Shuli Huang
Original Music
Nicolas Verheaghe
Director
Shuli Huang
Shuli Huang is a writer, director, and cinematographer born in Wenzhou, China. After graduating from Beijing Film Academy in 2019, he moved to New York City as an MFA candidate for NYU’s film program. Farewell, My Hometown (2021), his feature debut as a cinematographer, won the New Currents Award at the 26th Busan International Film Festival. His second short film, Will You Look At Me (2022), was selected for Cannes’ La Semaine de la Critique.