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Run Away

Yang Chao

Release year: 2002

Run time: 29 mins

Film type: Fiction

Synopsis

 Lu Lin is a car inspector who spends his days hitting the wheels of trains with a hammer to hear if the wheels are in order by the sound. Lu Lin hated the job and everyone associated with it. To escape working alone, he tried to become a basketball player for his unit, but ultimately failed. For Lu Lin, the only place to escape was the abandoned airfield at the Air Force Academy. There, he could hear the loud sound that enveloped everything when the aircraft engines were idling for a test run. He loves this sound so much, it is the only passion he has left in his utterly banal life. The film attempts to portray the anxieties of a young contemporary Chinese worker. When he is placed in an uncreative, repetitive position, his childhood ideals become his only support for enduring a life of mediocrity. In his mind, the struggle between ideal and reality is always present, yet he only takes the anxious state of this struggle itself as the goal of his life, perpetually maintaining a sense of tension with his surroundings, without ever making even a single practical effort to escape them and realise his ideal. He wants to escape, but he doesn't even have the strength to move his feet.

 

Director biography

Yang Chao (b. 1974, China) began studies in direction at the Beijing Film Academy in 1997. His graduation project, the short film Run Away, was distinguished in the Cinéfondation student film program at Cannes 2001. His feature debut, Passages, was selected for the informative section Un certain regard at the 57th Cannes festival.