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US Premiere!
Directed by Peng Tao
Peng Tao’s remarkable feature achieves a soaring humanism and lyricism from out of darkness in its portrait of life among the lowly and the lonely. Peng’s “cremator” is Cao, a man who makes an official living incinerating the dead, and a secondary one selling “ghost wives” to bereaved families seeking companions to be interred with their deceased, single sons – a feudal tradition that still survives in some areas of China. Cao has become an effective matchmaker though he finds this clandestine work wearying and alienating. Single and unwell himself, he begins to form a plan for his own afterlife. His plot is upended, however, by the arrival of a young woman at the morgue, seeking her long-missing sister. Cao’s succeeding journey with this young woman sets up the film’s second half, in which his new companion battles her own mounting hardships, and gradually becomes embroiled in his, leading to a denouement of exceeding loveliness.
Peng’s understated direction guides the protagonists through a succession of solitary experiences as they quietly negotiate the moral thicket of their choices. An intricate sound design powerfully evokes their inner world. With a light touch, Peng sets up a contrast between elaborate ceremonies of death and bereavement and the private practice of human kindness, delicately suggesting that transcendent grace is sometimes best proven by its human expression.
– Shannon Kelley
Producer: Gao Hong. Screenwriter/Editor: Peng Tao. Cinematographer: Li Xi. Cast: Cheng Zhengwu, Lang Nv.
HDCAM, color, Putonghua w/ English s/t, 90 min.
