Poet on a Business Trip
Shi ren chu chai le
In 2002, Ju Anqi made a film about a tour by the poet Shu through Xinjiang, the most western-lying, autonomous Uyghur province of China. All that we know about Shu is that he plays a poet who sends himself on a business trip – an absurd, satirical starting point that sets the tone for the film.
For a variety of reasons, it was not until 2013 that Ju started editing the rough, lyrical material that he had shot in what is now a very restless Xinjiang: it’s like an excellent wine that has had time to mature. Structured around 16 poems which he wrote on the road, Shu’s physically exhausting journey takes him along endless rocky roads, passing shabby inns and through impressive landscapes from one prostitute to the next.
In its documentary authenticity, Poet on a Business Trip is also an historic document that exudes an atmosphere of loss, providing an unsentimental yet melancholy glimpse of a country in transition and a mirror for the existential irreversibility of time.
Winner NETPAC Award 2015
Film details
- Country of production
- China
- Year
- 2015
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2015
- Length
- 103"
- Medium/Format
- DCP
You may also like this
-
Key House Mirror
An old woman (a wonderful Gita Nørby) in the autumn of her life falls in love with a man who is not her husband. This time, the director of rea
-
Spectrum Premieres
-
The Big Screen Award
-
-
A Corner of Heaven
With elegant camera movements in apt black-and-white, cameraman/writer/director Zhang enchants the viewer: a gripping phantasmagoria of modern slavery
-
Hubert Bals Fund, Brave Cinema
-
Spectrum Premieres
-
-
The End of an Age
A joy for the eyes and ears, this high-point of the Brazilian trilogy Operation Sonia Silk. A dreamy making-of about the two other episodes and also a
-
Spectrum Premieres
-