Tag: Zu Feng

Per Aspera Ad Astra (星河入梦, Han Yan, 2026)

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In the not too distant future, space travel has become normal and humans can reach the furthest corners of the universe through hyper stasis. However, long years spent in cryogenic sleep eventually damaged the sleepers’ brains. A solution was found in an AI program which allowed them to dream during the journey and, therefore, keep their brains active. Han Yan’s Per Aspera ad Astra (星河入梦, Xīnghé Rùmèng) makes a villain of a rogue AI but finally seems to come down on the idea that AI should be a tool used by humans rather the other way round while refusing to condemn it outright.

One question the film only partly answers is why people would be prepared to embark on decades-long journeys meaning they’d never see their families again. Neither Tianbao (Dylan Wang) nor the ship’s captain Simeng (Victoria Song) have living family members, so perhaps it isn’t a problem for them, but still it’s a risk. Who’s to say what the world will be like after you’ve been asleep for over 60 years. To that extent, perhaps it’s strange the technology doesn’t seem to move on at all, according to news reports, save a late upgrade to try and prevent the Good Dreams AI system from becoming sentient. 

That all these people got a big ship to sail for 65 years to do farming suggests that there may be serious issues on the ground, while the fact they were sent at all either implies a desire for imperialistic expansion in space or a search for a new home for humanity after we’ve exhausted the earth. Ge Yang (Wang Duo), another crew member, hints that the world might have problems in insisting that he doesn’t want to wake up. He’s prepared to crush everyone else’s dreams to ensure he keeps his and can stay here rather than having to go back to the real world. He says he wants to create a place that’s free of abuse and exploitation where no one has to live like a dog. 

The ironic thing is that engineer Bai (Zu Feng) had deliberately chosen to be a pet dog in his dream because, according to him, dogs have more freedom. Bai’s dreams seem to be inspired by classic Hong Kong crime cinema with everyone speaking Cantonese, even Tianbao and Simeng when they land there, while they also make a brief matrix-inspired appearance to shoot up the room. Of course, Good Dreams isn’t that much different from the Matrix and the line between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred with the pair getting caught out by dreams within dreams as they try to stop Ge Yang before he succeeds in smashing all the dreams together and killing his colleagues to create his “better” world. 

But it seems there’s something more going on than just Ge Yang’s nihilistic despair and Good Dreams may have gone rogue, preferring to create an AI-based world in which humanity is irrelevant. Tianbao also seems to know much more than he’s letting on which probably isn’t included in the standard crew member’s manual. His inappropriate way of speaking is later revealed to have a practical application, though what eventually seems to happen is that he becomes one with the system giving Good Dreams a soul and effectively taking it back into “human” hands rather than letting it run riot on its own. 

It is then slightly ironic that the film seems to feature some AI imagery, though otherwise largely shot on practical sets and featuring fantastic production design. Han zips back and forthe between dreams expressing the private aspirations and anxieties of the crew members as some relive high school exams and spend time with absent loved ones, and others trek through deserts or spend 60+ years in nightclubs. Only Tianbao apparently did not bother to customise his dream or engage with the system which is what brought him to its attention. In any case, humanity seems to be the most important component in the bonds that arise between Tianbao, the captain Simeng, and the engineer Bai as they try their best to save the ship along with their colleagues so they can complete their distant farming mission. A true visual spectacle, the film is perhaps also a testament to the power of dreams, to which the AI hallucination may pale in comparison.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Long Shot (老枪, Gao Peng, 2023)

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The hero of Gao Peng’s A Long Shot (老枪, lǎo qiāng) is forever reminding himself to “regain your focus”, yet in other ways it’s something that he’s making an active choice not to do and that others wish he wouldn’t. Set amid the chaos of China’s mid-90s economic reforms, the film suggests that Xue Bing has little other option than to tune himself out and avoid being a direct part of the corruption all around him as he has little power to stop it.

In a prologue set five years before the main action, Xue Bing (Zu Feng) had been a sharpshooter on the national team but is told that he has experienced hearing loss which may affect his balance and is subsequently let go. The hearing loss is perhaps symbolic of the fact that Xue Bing does not listen to the lies and double talk around him and maintains an integrity that is nothing but irritating to his morally compromised colleagues. On the other hand, he later tells Xiao Jun (Zhou Zhengjie), a teenage boy to whom he’s become a kind of father figure, that staring at a bull’s eye all your life isn’t good for your eyes hinting at his problematic hyper focus in which he’s just trying to keep his head down and do the best job he can under the circumstances.

But the circumstances are grim for everyone. Now with shaggy hair and a look of disappointment in his eye, Xue Bing works as a security guard at a moribund ferroalloy factory where the workers haven’t been paid in years as the nation goes through a number of complex economic reforms that are changing the face of the nation and giving rise to a new class of wealthy elites who’ve gained their riches through immoral and exploitative means. With people not being paid, thefts are a common occurrence but the security guards have turned to taking bribes, tacitly turning a blind to equipment going missing if the thieves are willing and able to pay a small fee. Xue Bing doesn’t like to go along with this and avoids joining in, but is powerless against the other guards including his boss Chief Tian (Shao Bing). 

The film frames the factory as a microcosm of the wider society which has become a vicious circle of corruption. But on the other hand, the workers guards, and even in the management see themselves as taking what was rightfully theirs but has been unfairly denied them. The workers steal from their employer because their wages weren’t paid, the guards aren’t getting paid either so they extort the workers and rip off the company, while the management know the factory’s effectively bust so they’re asset stripping while they still can. Chief Tian runs into one of the thieves who’s since started a “trading company” having taken some cues from a Russian working at an equally moribund shipyard where he’s no longer monitored by the authorities and has been selling off warships as scrap hinting at the disintegration of post-war communism and the resulting capitalist free for all that followed. 

Xiao Jun, the son of a woman Xue Bing thinks he’s in a relationship with but the reality is somewhat ambiguous, is caught amid this crossfire as a young man coming of age in complicated times. He resents the corruption he sees around him and bonds with Xue Bing thinking he’s a straight shooter only to be disappointed by his defeated complicity which he also sees as a kind of unmanliness. Xiao Jun’s mother, Jin (Qin Hailu), had been trying to run her own business but later gets a job in a nightclub that seems to be sex work adjacent thanks to her relationship with another corrupt businessman, Mr Zhao. She remarks to Xue Bing that there are so many ways to earn a living these days she doesn’t understand why anyone would go back to the factory, laying bare the wholesale change in the society. Xiao Jun has taken up with a gang of seeming delinquents who frequently loot the factory complex, but even they are only taking what they think is theirs as one of the boy’s fathers was killed in a workplace accident and the family was only given a certificate of commendation rather than financial compensation for the father’s lost wages without which they are unable to support themselves. 

The guards have been told they’ll finally get paid after the company’s 40th anniversary celebrations, with corrupt manager Sun telling Tian he’ll need his help to keep the others in line when he presses him and is finally told they’ll only get two months’ worth of the back pay they’re owed. Xue Bing is told Sun was selling off the lathe machines in order to pay the workers, and it seems like he believes them naively falling for their greater good narrative while Xiao Jun seems on a collision with adult hypocrisy refusing to sign a false confession to get the managers off the hook. Gao lends Xue Bing’s world a greying hopelessness in which the only two choices are to close his eyes and ears or go down fighting, closing with a lengthy shootout in which firecrackers mingle with gunshots masking the sound of rebellion from a continually unheard underclass.

 A Long Shot screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Brief History of a Family (家庭简史, Lin Jianjie, 2024)

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Part way through Lin Jianjie’s smouldering social drama A Brief History of a Family (家庭简史, Jiātíng Jiǎnshǐ), two boys play a game with a series of coins in which the objective is not to be forced into claiming the last remaining piece. Shuo (Sun Xilun), a visitor to the other boy’s home who had been starting the game remarks that whoever gets to play second will always find a way to win which is quite an ambivalent statement given the questions we might ask of what playing second might mean. 

In any case, Shuo clearly has an intention and desire to work his way into this stereotypically nice, upper-middle class family with its tastefully decorated home. He gives away little about himself and we can’t even be sure how much of what he says is true, whether he really yearns for the mother who died suddenly when he was ten or is astutely playing on the frustrated maternity of Mrs Tu (Guo Keyu), or whether his father really is a violent drunk who beats him out of a sense of defeat and insecurity feeling betrayed on finding out that he’s been spending all his time with the Tus. Their son, Wei (Lin Muran) who goes to his school and seemingly befriends him, is by contrast an almost open book aside from the lies he tells his parents in choosing to follow his own desires at the fencing club rather than attend English classes.

It’s this contrast between the two boys that comes to emblematise the crises at the heart of the contemporary China in the wake of the easing of the One Child Policy. It gradually becomes clear that Tus have on some level already given up on Wei who does not fulfil their expectations as the perfect son of a middle-class couple. Mr Tu (Zu Feng) in particular is austere and traditionalist. Wei points out that he made him study calligraphy at an early age but what use is it when everyone types? He threatens to send him abroad to study if his grades don’t improve, but then begins to switch his allegiance towards Shuo who is quiet and intellectual in contrast to Wei’s perhaps outdated brand of virile masculinity. In a pregnant moment, Wei begins to realise that he’s being replaced, displaced inside his own home, when the chairs around the dinner table are rearranged from two on left and right to one on each side with his parents and Shuo huddled on the other end discussing Ivy League colleges and dismissing his news that he made it onto the county fencing team with the false enthusiasm shown to a child who’s just drawn a picture that will soon be pinned to the fridge.

Yet there’s also a transgressive element of homoerotic tension between the boys that is surprising given the censors’s usual objections. Lin frames them sheltering from the rain playing at fencing with umbrellas until Wei symbolically kills Shuo and cradles him softly in a pieta surrounded by a pool of light. At a later moment Shuo moves offscreen and we hear what sounds like a peck of a kiss, though we can’t be sure if it’s pure calculation or an attempt either to calm or needle an increasingly febrile Wei who is very definitely concerned about his place within the family and feels as if the rug is being pulled from under him. 

Every so often Lin cuts back to a circular frame, as if looking through a microscope studying the dynamics of this family and how they change once Shuo enters the picture. Shuo seems to instructively spot the loneliness in Mrs Tu, looking at photos from a holiday taken before she was married in which she looks happy and free while her life as a stereotypical housewife has robbed her of individual fulfilment outside of her husband and son. Mr Tu meanwhile looks down on his wife intellectually and is disappointed in his son who he feels reflects badly on him. Later we discover that they conceived a second child but Mr Tu insisted on an abortion rather than pay the fine though the undercurrent is that had it been born they would not necessarily have been so disappointed in their son. Mrs Tu describes Shuo as their second chance, in one fell swoop admitting their “failure” with Wei while buying themselves a shot at the kind of child they always wanted to have, a “good son” like Shuo who is quiet and intellectual and can easily fit into their world. An attempt to teach him tennis ends in disaster, but Mr Tu says it doesn’t matter because he will “train him systemically”.

This seems to be the implication the film is making, that the systematic training of the young to turn them into the children their parents want them to be is producing only barely constrained rage and resentment. The cool and clinical aesthetic of the microscope window suddenly turns a bloody red while we see Wei try to construct a beauty that might not in reality be there. The chairs are put back in their original position complete with their sense of absence but his parents seem to be in their own worlds. They eat in silence, and do not even really look at him. He goes to English cram school but is made to robotically repeat meaningless phrases until he drops the pace, looking into the camera with darkened eyes that suggest an oncoming explosion. Lin conjures a smouldering sense of dread in the urgent string score, slow creep zooms, and usual framing that often cuts someone out be it Shuo on the doorstep trying to cross a threshold or Wei with his back to us wondering how he can turn the camera around all while we place this family under a microscope doubling for the oppressive gaze of an all too conformist society.

Brief History of a Family received its World Premiere as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Images courtesy of First Light Films.