Lei Lei
United States, Netherlands | 2022 | 104 min
Swiss Premiere
Language : Chinese
Subtitles : French, English
Through interviews with his father and his grandfather, Lei Lei looks back at a tragic family past marked by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its ensuing violence. In this animation film fuelled by pop art and propaganda images, the director sets out to construct and deconstruct the archives of his own memory, taken directly from his own gaze as a child.
The filmmaker Lei Lei sketches out a moving family chronicle based on voice-over conversations with his father and his grandfather, featuring gentle words recorded at home, which reveal his father Jiaqi’s humility in suffering, and his grandfather Ting’s elderly fragility. Fuelled by pop art, childish innocence and propaganda pictures, Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish’s aesthetics are reminiscent of the animated films of the Iranian Kanoon. A collage overflowing with imagination, from a child’s perspective, which names the unnameable, suggesting shapes, textures and colours to summon up the atrocities committed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A fantastical account populated with sound effects from which appear images, but also a sensorial search for identity that goes beyond the boundaries of recorded speech, in which the landscapes of food intermingle with the spellbound gaze of a child discovering his love for film. Lei Lei’s second film Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish was presented as part of the Tiger Competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Javier Martín
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