Feature-length film in 68 mins | 2019 | Second-hand photos, Found footage, Commercial Catalog
SYNOPSIS
"What did you dream about and how was your life as a teenager?" A woman recalls her youthful memories of her 1970’s while the re-creation of the modernity of the past of China unfolds in front of our eyes. One day, the first breathless animal appears to her, a White horse…
Experimental animator Lei Lei’s first feature film BreathlessAnimals is in many ways reminiscent of what film scholar Bill Nicholshas called the poetic mode of documentary. Harking back to modernist works of the 1920s like Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and Ruttmann’s Berlin:A Symphony of a Great City, poetic documentaries tend to emphasise rhythmic, formal and visual associations much more than ‘displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion.’ In Breathless Animals, Lei Lei meticulously composes visual documents and oral family history less into a symphony than a kind of electroacousmatic rap exploring a generational gap in Chinese cultural identity.
—— Open City Film Festival