Lush Reeds
Yang Yishu
Release year: 2018
Run time: 105 mins
Film type: Fiction
Synopsis
Newly married reporter Xia Yin moves into her husband’s apartment. On account either of work or psychological malaise, she cannot bring herself to tidy away her personal belongings from her pre-married life. An adventurous trip into the countryside for an interview and causes her to re-examine her situation.
Director biography
Dr Yang Yishu is currently an Associate Professor of Filmmaking and Dramatic Arts at Nanjing University. Before its release on DVD in 2009, her 2006 documentary, Who is Hao Ran, was selected for the Locarno International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, and China Independent Film Festival. One Summer, her first fiction film, was selected for the 2014 Busan Film Festival of Korean and the 2015 Vesoul Film Festival—where it won the Prix du Jury—and was also selected for the 2015 Hamburg Film Festival, the Taiwan Women’s Film Festival, and won Best Fiction Film at the Beijing Independent Film Festival. Her book, Film Within Film: A Study of Meta-Cinema, was published by Nanjing University Press in 2011.
Director's statement
This film tries to write the present metaphorically, describing a certain psychological state. The metaphor represents the difficult situation of the contemporary middle class as well as the rural-urban divide. The movie is made up of two parts: first, city-home-stifled space, the inability to put away one’s past, and the deficiencies which emerge in an era of overabundance; second, the village—an alien social space for an intellectual—a divide so great that it produces disorientation.