Bipolar

Queena Li | China | 2021 | 111' |

| IFFR 2021

In this inventive, hyper-crazy variation on the myth of Orpheus, a young woman arrives in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. She has come as a pilgrim, she says – but in reality she doesn’t have much idea of why she is here. She has been blown to Lhasa by the pain of a loss; pain she doesn’t yet know how to handle.

Whatever her vague plans were, everything changes when she sees a lobster in a way-too-small aquarium in the restaurant of her hotel. The waiters assure her that it’s a holy lobster, one that thrives only in the light of the Ming Island lighthouse, far away at sea – but now it’s stuck in this tank of water. Before the other hotel guests are even awake, she has bought a car from a taxi driver for the long journey to Ming Island.

Dreams, hallucinations and memories in a nocturnal swimming pool gradually reveal the true nature of her pilgrimage to the sea. Perhaps she will be able to drag the pain of her loss away from the gates of hell and let it go. Maybe she again wants to feel the wind of life blowing in her face after months of the silence of death. Bipolar is a road movie with Western accents in high-contrast black-and-white and a carnival of bizarre apparitions which slowly lead the young woman back to reality. However weird this may be.