Muzi, 22, returns to her native Hangzhou to spend the Chinese New Year with her family and take on old social roles for the time being—that of the daughter, sister, and lover. She meets a strange man who awakens memories of her past relationships. Garage Screen presents the Moscow premiere of the experimental Chinese drama that has won the main competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. The Cloud in Her Room was also awarded the main competition’s Grand Prix at the inaugural New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival “for the masterfully designed depiction of Hangzhou from an unexpected angle.”
Xinyuan Zheng Lu’s feature-length debut infiltrates the tradition of Chinese socialist realism with the free spirit of the new wave. Her unexpected experimentations with form and structure, spontaneous associations, and bold introduction of documentary elements do not destroy the film’s subjective integrity. Doubles and scenes mirroring each other that are not always easy to comprehend, experimental inserts—everything in the movie is set to create an utterly personal story of a representative of her generation.
Stuck in limbo, suspended between the past and the future in a city which is, at once, so distant and so close. Muzi tries to find her identity and move forward. This is a first-person story, but also a voluminous collective portrait of China’s twenty-something generation, pictured from an angle previously unknown to us. A genuine breakthrough in contemporary Chinese cinema, The Cloud in Her Room is the winner of the main competition at the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
The film will be screened in Chinese and English with Russian subtitles.
The Cloud in Her Room
Dir. Xinyuan Zheng Lu
Hong Kong, China, 2020. 101 min. 18+
