Official Competition 2019

My Dear Friend

Yang Pingdao I 2018 I 106'

SYNOPSIS

The old Zhongsheng knows his days are numbered. He recalls a visit to a remote village with Shuimu when they were young, and a rumor about the massacre of a family and a little boy who floated down a river. Zhongsheng was sure he was the boy and the village was his birthplace. Watching his friend grow increasingly anxious, Shuimu decides to take him tohis‘roots’. During the journey, the men encounter their childhoods and younger selves.

BIOGRAPHY

Yang Pingdao

YANG PINGDAO (China, 1980) graduated from the China National Academy of Dramatic Arts. This director, screenwriter and novelist has won numerous international awards for his documentary The River of Life (2014). My Dear Friend (2018) is his first fiction feature film.

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Critical text

Big movie surprises usually come from the margins. Yang Pingdao’s debut feature, which was screened in a parallel section of the Busan Film Festival, enriches its suggestive initial premise to embark us on one of the most intense and unpredictable physical and emotional journeys of recent cinema. What begins as one of the many mismatches between urban and rural culture –a mismatch of special relevance in contemporary China– is progressively transformed into a first mysterious and later melancholic inquiry into the past, the affective bonds and the erosive outcomes of modernity. The film, step by step, abandons its first narrative approaches and even the mere realistic semblance to end up composing a story that moves between the dreamlike and the allegorical without losing discursive clarity. Yang builds for the characters and the audience a gear of labyrinthine fascination in which it is worth going astray. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH

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