Winter Vacation

With his third film, Winter Vacation, the poet, writer and film maker Li Hongqi won a Golden Leopard in Locarno. The film is largely set on the last day of the winter holiday in a dismal small industrial town in North China. To say that little happens is an understatement. A group of school children who are getting bored and hanging around aimlessly do not even have the energy to cause trouble.
Generally fixed and distant camera angles are used by Li to record the slow, repetitive, boring existence of the villagers. Maybe the least enviable is Zhou Zhangxin, a boy who sits in the room with his depressed grandfather, who won’t let him play outside. When a girl asks him what he wants to be later, he says: ‘An orphan.’
The accumulation of boredom and hopeless misery becomes hilarious in a dry and comic way. Li’s sober, modest style evokes comparisons with Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson.