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Hei Qi

Zhang Ping

Release year: 2021

Run time: 101 mins

Film type: Documentary

Synopsis

My parents live in a mountain village, whose name is like a spell and is unknown to the outsiders. Here, my father is walking towards the end of his life. The shadow of death shows another aspect of life. The dead family members reunite with the living ones. When death comes, the body as a container gradually opens, and the gate of a synesthesia world opens.

 

Director biography

ZHANG Ping, writer and filmmaker, born in Hunan in 1978. She worked in Tibet from 2003 to 2012 as a writer and contemporary artist, and has lived in Beijing since 2014, working in film, theatre and writing. She has completed four documentaries independently, including No Land (2015), Healing Balm (2017), Love Song for Living, Love Song for the Dead(2019) and Hei Qi (2021), which have entered film festivals and archival collections at home and abroad. She has published a collection of essays Ten Years of Tibetan Drift (CITIC Press, 2014), and an experimental novel Finding a Grassy Slope with the Wind and Sunshine to Sleep (Shanghai Sanlian Publishing House, 2017).

Director's statement

I found an interesting thing: I could not tell the name of our village in our dialect. For many years, the outsiders did not know about the village we mentioned. This village, standing alone in the world, is full of green even in winter. The daily life of my parents that I see and cannot see and the glimmers of the history scattered in the present had a meaning.