Film Archive

Jahr

Land (Film Archive)

Filmstill Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish

Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish
Lei Lei
Competition for the Audience Award 2022
Animated Film
USA,
Netherlands
2022
104 minutes
Chinese
Subtitles: 
English

The tumultuous 1960s in China as a collage of archival images, clay figures and interviews. Lei Lei lets his father and his grandfather talk, about bicycles and bank clerks, about life in the countryside, re-education and class enemies. Their memories generate a multicoloured surreal world that is an enchanting fantasy of the time before and during the Cultural Revolution.

In his second feature-length film, artist and animation filmmaker Lei Lei once more takes up experiences of family members and uncovers a piece of national history via private stories. For more than six years, he collected family photos, postcards, propaganda images and old films. On this backdrop he forms and moves his characters made of gum-like pastel modelling clay, whose colourful, almost childlike appearance supports the impression that this is where a grandson imagines the anecdotal memoirs of his ancestors. But this imaginative animation is anything but naïve: It takes the time to accommodate the detours and pauses in the narrative and takes us – by means of a restrained soundscape, too – deep into a universe where one can lose oneself.
Marie Kloos

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Lei Lei
Script
Lei Lei
Cinematographer
Lei Lei
Editor
Lei Lei, Patrick Minks
Producer
Isabelle Glachant, Lei Lei
Co-Producer
Bruno Felix, Janneke van de Kerkhof, Femke Wolting
Score
Tessa Rose Jackson, Darius Timmer
Animation
Lei Lei
World Sales
Lya Li