Sun Spots

The plot of Sun Spots is minimal. It all comes down to a tragic love triangle. A tattooed young man lives without God, injunctions or aim in a quiet green corner of China. He does violent jobs for loan sharks – his machete is never out of reach. He falls in love with a pretty girl. She tries to forget her sorrow about the deceit of her former lover.
If this synopsis sounds like a typical Asian gangster melodrama, the style and story of Yang Heng’s second feature is very different. In 31 shots, he shows what is possible with the sharpness of modern HD video, without camera movements, zooms or cuts. The visual experience is shaped by the length of time that people get to study all the details in the beautiful landscapes – from discarded beer bottles in the foreground to small rivers in the background and of course the body language of the characters, who are (usually) somewhere in the middle. The soundtrack, in which the occasionally uncomfortably long silences in the conversations are filled by background sounds, has the same beauty. And as one can expect in successful examples of this kind of minimalist cinema, the last shot (nine minutes long) is as enchanting as it is scary.
Yang previously made Betelnut and, especially for the IFFR, the installation Nirvana. Sun Spots was made with a contribution from the Hubert Bals Fund.

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