Late director Hu Bo’s final movie to feature at Tribeca
BEIJING: The final movie made by director Hu Go is to feature during the Tribeca film festival in New York.
Hu Bo had committed suicide last October. He was 29.
His movie, An Elephant Sitting Still, had mesmerised critics during the Berlin film festival in February. It was screened to a packed audience, and the jury granted it a Special Mention.
Sure to be remembered as a landmark in Chinese cinema, this intensely felt epic marks a career cut tragically short.
The protagonist of this modern reworking of the tale of Jason and the Argonauts is teenage Wei Bu, who critically injures a school bully by accident.
Over a single, eventful day, he crosses paths with a classmate, an elderly neighbour, and the bully’s older brother, all of them bearing their own individual burdens, and all drawn as if by gravity to the city of Manzhouli, where a mythical elephant is said to sit, indifferent to a cruel world.
Full of moody close-ups and virtuosic tracking shots, An Elephant Sitting Still is nothing short of a masterpiece.
The gloomy film captured the attention of quite a number of overseas press outlets and critics. The Hollywood Reporter noted that the film had “attained instant cult status among critics at the Berlinale,” while a review by the British Film InsHunagtitute called it “a shattering, soul-searching Chinese debut.”
Meanwhile, the made-inTaiwan film The Great Buddha + is also to feature at Tribeca.
The plotline is full of unexpected twists and turns.
Provincial friends Pickle and Belly Button idle away their nights in the security booth of a Buddha statue factory, where Pickle works as a guard.
One evening, when the TV is on the fritz, they put on video from the boss’s dashcam—only to discover illicit trysts and a mysterious act of violence. Expanded from a short, Huang Hsin-yao’s fiction feature debut, the movie is a stylish, rip-roaring satire on class and corruption in contemporary Taiwanese society.
Over a single, eventful day, he crosses paths with a classmate, an elderly neighbour, and the bully’s older brother, all of them bearing their own individual burdens, and all drawn as if by gravity to the city of Manzhouli, where a mythical elephant is said to sit, indifferent to a cruel world. Full of moody close-ups and virtuosic tracking shots,‘An Elephant Sitting Still’ is nothing short of a masterpiece.