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Floating

Huang Weikai

Release year: 2005

Run time: 93 mins

Film type: Documentary

Synopsis

A 30-year-old rural-born singer brings his guitar to Guangzhou to eke out a living by performing in public spaces. Like many migrant workers who don’t possess residence permits to stay in this southern metropolis, he is constantly dodging the authorities. The camera closely follows the singer’s daily life as he performs in pedestrian underpasses and lives out his tumultuous romantic life, which involves suicide, abortion and a bad break-up. As the film progresses, we find the filmmaker, who also made the much-praised Disorder (2009), getting intimately involved with his subject’s precarious existence. Floating offers a humanist portrayal of those who drift on the fringes of society.

 

Director biography

Huang Weikai was born in 1972 in Guangdong Province, China. He studied Chinese landscape painting for 15 years since he was 10. In 1995 he graduated from the Chinese Art Dept. of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Huang Weikai worked as a cinema promoter, art editor, graphic designer, movie script writer and cinematographer before becoming a director in 2002.