Trailer: Nezha1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteDescription
NEZHA, a Taipei Golden Horse nomination, is a microcosm of developing China from the 90s to 00s. The film takes the audience back to the 90s and to a rural city Baocheng in China. Wang Xiaobing is a middle school “good student” who lives in two extremes, the most complicated and the simplest. A broken pair of parents makes her learn the hypocrisy of the adult world. Literature keeps her reside in her inner world, where honesty and loyalty to what one believes is the only living code. Li Xiaolu, a transfer student fortifies Xiaobing’s inner castle when she enters her life wearing a confidence that her peers do not have. Xiaobing admires Xiaolu’s strong sense of justice, which does not agree with cultural norms and school rules. However, their distinct experience separates the two best friends gradually.
The audience’s visual perception accompanies Xiaobing’s emotion fluctuations. The cinematography captures the dark-lit household, structured classroom as well as the wide field and green landscape, echoing the contrast between societal reality and Xiaobing’s inner Utopia. Years past, the two worlds coexist and both are fragmented; neither of the two has force to terminate the other, until Xiaobing makes a decision to make only one world survive.
via Asian American International Film Festival 2015
