Shen Ruilan
2021
每次见面都像是告别
Wang Ping
Wang Ping, Shen Ruilan
The film documents a trip that the filmmaker took with her parents. Both in their sixties, they had lived their lives in rural areas and never seen the sea. Thanks to the film, she had the opportunity to take her parents to the seaside. She found the island closest to home, Weizhou Island, and asked a photographer to film this trip. Different layers of reality — her parent’s fear of modern society, the daughter’s doubt about her own motivations, and the photographer’s change from an impartial documentarian to an emotional participant — emerged together. In the course of this short trip, the filmmaker started to reflect on art, family, and self, all through the recorded images.
Every Meeting seems a Parting
From Dark Matters
Shen Ruilan, Shen Ruilan
An intimate reading experience of voice messages from my grandmother‘s sleepless moments. A portrait of personal memory as it is reimagined and lingers for an instant. My phone camera documents wandering figures by a lakeside at night. Across from the lake, the sight of the dissolving cityscape appears to be both infinitely close and extremely remote. This film attempts to reconstruct the forgotten and the marginalized parts of individual beings in the scope of time. The film explores what’s beyond the visual expression and flows out of the flat screen to co-inhabit the space of the audience’s reality. The viewers would find themselves roaming through the ontological existence of film, confronted with sound, light, darkness, time and rhythms, transitioning between positive space and negative space, and approaching the very ambiguity of memory.
From Dark Matters
迦羅沙曳
Shen Ruilan
Kuan Yuan
I remember that I once tried to go far away to be a monk again. I didn’t know which temple to go to. I just wanted to find a temple. So, I choose another direction instead of going to the city. I walked from 4pm to 8 pm, it was gradually getting darker. With cars coming and going, I started walking aimlessly on the road…’ It is a project of a tracking record about a young man who planned to be a monk after 108 days. I got involved in the life of the protagonist, influenced some of his choices, and then I attempted to utilize subjective monologue to construct a narrative, coupled with his personal situation, his experience in the journey and his surroundings. ‘The Cassock’ is an intersection between the truly recorded video and non-fictional phone text. My interference of the events and supposition of its future progression are also included.
The Cassock
