Xue yun

As Han Jiangyu focuses his attention on the dead fish and the lobsters slowly dying on the grill, he asks his childhood friend Kei if the animals have a soul. Kei’s business is booming. The island of Hainan, to which Jiangyu has returned after ten years in prison, has changed dramatically. It has become a flagship site of intensive housing construction – and therefore also a paradise for rip-offs and fraud. Jiangyu also meets his old love again. She now has a daughter. Could the girl be his? Together with his central character – a marvellous performance from Lee Kang-Sheng, who even manages to crack a smile – debut director Wu Lang searches for traces of the old and familiar in the new. The camera captures his wanderings through various places with very little grandstanding but abundant sensitivity for people in spaces, relationships in limbo and societies in flux. Almost every shot is unexpected and seems unspectacular at first, yet the delicate way with which they unfold always contains, alongside visual precision, the urge to tell a story (without words). One such story being that every reunion is also a farewell. (Berlinale)