Incognito

As a boy growing up in China, I was obsessed with strange tales and mysterious bedtime stories. Especially those paranormal mysteries which left the reader with as many questions as answers. My father, a mathematics teacher, encouraged me to focus on science, astronomology specifically. As a scientist, he believed that any phenomenon could be explained through the acquisition of knowledge. In his mind, if I didn’t know the answer to a question, I simply hadn’t read enough books. However, the older I got, the more convinced I became that not everything could be easily explained, and sometimes we have to use our imagination to quiet our fervent “need to know.”

Several years ago, my own imagination shifted into high gear when I discovered an anthology entitled World’s Unsolved Mysteries. Inside was the story of Sergey Ponomarenko, a Russian man who claimed he teleported from the past. I soon found similar stories of time travelers who had been transported unwittingly into the future. Even strangers were those stories in which the time-traveler could provide circumstantial evidence that they were from the past. In rare cases, the psychiatrist working the case was provided with photographic evidence. After my first round of research, I wanted to make a film using this subject matter.

I shared the concept with my usual collaborators, and their enthusiasm encouraged me to begin working on the first draft. After two drafts, I began to think I’d made a mistake. Where was the momentum? What exactly was the conflict? I knew the film couldn’t survive on spectacle alone. It was only when I began to investigate the moral differences between the past and the future that my narrative came into focus, and the romance began to form. This romance would reflect both eras the film took place in. In the 1950s, it would be forbidden, in 1995, it would be accepted, yet judged.

I wanted to externalize what happens to those individuals who feel their society won’t allow them to be themselves, and love who they want. They find ways to cope, and in some cases, the space-time continuum assists them. In this way, I’ve attempted to explain the unexplainable through the overwhelming emotions of my characters. If our feelings are strong enough, we can change lives. Perhaps we cannot alter time and space, but we can alter perceptions, and that’s what Incognito, and all my films aspire to achieve.