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The Most Familiar Stranger

Dong Jun

Release year: 2021

Run time: 18 mins

Film type: Experimental Film

Synopsis

Dong Jun’s experimental video“When We Are Familiar Stranger, Close But Untouchable” is developed by his fictional text with symmetrical structure, and inspired by the universal but secret reality of life. The artist makes up a split situation between a married woman and the other through a female identity, Behind the seemingly stable and happy middle-class lifestyle, the heroine’s mind is nowhere to go. From this point of view, The Most Familiar Stranger is similar to Belle de jour ( Buñuel, 1967), both discussions started from the lust exploration to the human spiritual world. The artist presents his writing text exquisitely and emotionally, and expresses the phantasm of language rather than love. Love is absent, to some degree, The man only appears on the statement of woman’s “myself”, he is “blurry, illusory but distance relatively”. In addition, thirty-four narrators in the video are thirty-four different women.The starting point of the story is the text based on a male-made feminine oral narration. The story narrative depends on the expression and deduction of different women, and it is beyond confrontation between the sexes at the end of the story.

 

Director biography

Dong Jun was born in Xi'an. In 2001, he founded the non-profit art space "Liuhe Art Commune"; in 2005, he graduated from Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, majoring in photography, and then stayed as a teacher. Engaged in image creation for many years, participated in many domestic and foreign art exhibitions and film festivals, and won the 2005 Pingyao International Photography Festival Young Photographer Award. His works have been collected by academic institutions such as the Long March Foundation of the United States and the International Art Research Center of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Documentary works include "SARS Ongoing", "Anthracite Shop", "Models", "Party", etc.