Feature-length film in 104 mins | 2022 | Animation, Second-hand photos, Found footage.
SYNOPSIS
In a world of propaganda images, surrealist collage and pop-art animation, artist-filmmaker Lei Lei and his family recall the past to make sense of the present. 1950's, Jiaqi is 4 years old when his father is compelled to go work in the countryside and his mother passes away.
Shortly after the burial, Dad is forced to put Jiaqi and his sister in an orphanage where they turn into birds in a cage. While the country is in turmoil, a Rainbow fish transforms into a woman and decides to help the kids……
CAST & CREDITS
Director : LEI Lei
Animation & Image : LEI Lei
Sound Design & Music : Tessa Rose JACKSON & Darius TIMMER
Editors : LEI Lei & Patrick MINKS Producers : LEI Lei & Isabelle GLACHANT
The warm and open manner in which they recall big events and small but significant moments from family life 50 and 60 years ago makes it easy for viewers to connect emotionally with their tales of love, loss and dislocation. With some lovely humor included along the way, the film’s well-ordered narration gives the film a solid storytelling foundation for Lei to overlay with a nonstop exhibition of eye-popping visuals.
—— Variety
Pretty much straight out of the gate, Silver Bird And Rainbow Fish establishes an idiosyncratic and distinctive aesthetic: Lei augments old photos with brightly coloured overlays, and is insatiably fond of shocking-pink hues. The Chinese countryside of bygone days can thus, in his hands, assume the contours of Oz as seen during an LSD-trip. The faces of his family members — including his father Lei Jiaqi, grandfather Lei Ting — are meanwhile nearly always obscured by blobbily two-dimensional plasticine renderings, stylisations of a deliberately child-like simplicity.
—— Screen