Field
“If you love freedom, don’t unveil me.”
“For here there is no place that does not see you.”
Your look has ignited a gaze, a gaze that melts into the object of the gaze, confusing the perceiver with the perceived. As particles enter us and our particles spurt out, we disentagle and radiate ourselves - flickering in fire, dispersing in water, shouting into the wind, buried in the earth, diving with fish, soaring with birds, licked by dogs, perfused with electromagnetism. They we become, and the world we thus shall be.
A chaotic field awakens four kinds of emotions that have this in common: they are full of contradictions; they are ambiguous and indeterminate; they seem real but are fictions. A man attends his classmates’ reunion at a scorchingly hot open-air barbecue stand. He is delighted to meet his first love from 20 years ago, but gives up his desire to have sex with her. A woman, anxious to see her critically ill friend, flags down a passing car, but changes her mind after an entire day of driving through the rain. A woman meets her long-time boyfriend for a tryst in a hotel room. Assailed by a fierce wind, she intends to break up with him, but does not have the strength to do it. A drunken man calls his wife from a dusty, gritty vacant lot on the outskirts of a city. He mentions death in passing, then decides to kill himself.
“We have returned there where we had never been.”
“We are in the midst of an adventure, and are forever heading towards it.”
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Meijing LüDirectorA Poet in Exile, Gu Cheng, The Doors, Field,
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Meijing LüWriterA Poet in Exile, Gu Cheng, The Doors,Field,
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Yishuang YuWriterAll That Is Solid Melts Into Air, We Didn't Start The Fire,
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Zhaoyu LiProducerKaili Blues, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Poet in Exile, Gu Cheng, Field,
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Siyi PanProducerThe Night Of Full Moon, Cats on Borges' window sill, The Return, Field,
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Meijing LüProducerA Poet in Exile, Gu Cheng, The Doors, Field,
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Houyao YangKey Cast"Liu Ming "Minning Town, Hourglass House, Field,
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Yiying LiuKey Cast"Yu Hong "The Story of Xing Fu, Field,
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Shujie CaiKey Cast"Cao Pan"Rhinoceros In Love, Field,
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Xi LeKey Cast"Wang Wei"A Madman's Diary, Field,
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Nan CuiKey Cast"Zhong Ran"Ripples of Life, A Dog Barking at the Moon, Field,
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Jianjun DingKey Cast"Yang Liang"Everything is Unknown, Field,
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Project Title (Original Language):烟消云散 (Yan Xiao Yun San)
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Project Type:Experimental, Short
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Genres:Drama, Fiction
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Runtime:13 minutes 10 seconds
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Completion Date:October 12, 2022
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Production Budget:20,000 USD
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Country of Origin:China
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Country of Filming:China
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Language:Mandarin Chinese
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Shooting Format:HD2K
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Black & White and Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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Thessaloniki International Short Film FestivalThessaloniki
Greece
October 13, 2022
greece premiere
official competition -
Salerno International Film FestivalSalerno
Italy
November 28, 2022
italian premiere
official competition -
AVIFF Cannes Art Film FestivalMarseille
France
June 24, 2023
french premiere
official competition
Lü Meijing, director, screenwriter, writer, bachelor of Mathematics. She was born in China in 1988. She worked as a cultural journalist from 2011 to 2016. She has made documentaries, experimental films and short films since 2012.
From 2017 to 2023, she wrote a soft sci-fi and noir script, In the Bar of Lost Youth, which was pre-selected by Hubert Bals Fund (both Bright Future and Voices subcategories of Script and Project Development scheme) in 2018 and 2019.
Documentaries:
A Poet in Exile, Gu Cheng (2016) as Director
The Doors (2016) as Director
Short:
Field (2022) as Director
Producer’s biography
Li Zhaoyu, software engineer, independent film producer, curator of China Women’s Film Festival (2013-2015). She was born in China in 1986. She lives in Canada now.
List:
Kaili Blues (2015) as Producer
A Poet in Exile, Gu Cheng (2016) as Producer
Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018) as Overseas Producer
Field (2022) as Producer
Nowadays, we are immersed in thoroughly networked over-consumption, excessively homogeneous social interactions, and a single-minded pursuit of technological capability. This transforms social life into an empty, illusory spectacle.
Nevertheless, the world of postmodern knowledge no longer has a meta-discourse. Data in principle is accessible to anyone, thereby allowing for the possibilities of a new “subjectless community”, whose membership demands no substantial commitments but transcends what we now understand as identity.
In our short film Field, we try using a new kind of inter-related, to fictionalize the existing possibilities. Persons – in their relationships with fire, water, air, earth, birds, dogs, fish, cellphones/electromagnetism, language etc. – Regarding, or gazing becomes a way to open up the solipsist self, thereby awakening emotional experiences in different consciousnesses by means of iterations of communication that form perceptual resonance.
Every person is given to the world. From the chaos where everything infiltrates everything, thereby generating a “autopoietic areality” that exists in a probability cloud of “being-with-one-another”.
“The innermost character of salvation is that we are saved only at the point when we no longer want to be,” as Giorgio Agamben has said, “We can have hope only in what is without remedy. That things are thus and thus-this is still in the world. But that this is irreparable, that this thus is without remedy, that we can contemplate it as such-this is the only passage outside the world.”