This film is part of our winter series, running at De Uitkijk throughout December and January. This year, our winter series focuses on loneliness, but don’t worry, you can still enjoy warmth and good company at De Uitkijk…!
The dawn breaks over a bleak, gray industrial city in northern China. From sunrise to sunset, we follow four characters whose lives will intersect. Yu Cheng, a young petty criminal, is searching for 16-year-old Wei Bu, who accidentally left his brother critically injured. There is also 60-year-old Wang Jin, who fears his family will place him in a nursing home. And then there’s Huang Ling, Wei Bu’s classmate, who is involved with a member of the school administration. The title refers to a myth: in the far north of China, an elephant in a zoo refuses to eat or move, letting all the world’s suffering pass off it. One of the main characters is determined to see this elephant.
A film of exceptionally high aesthetic quality: long takes, masterful use of depth of field, a muted color palette, and a beautiful soundtrack. All of this creates a uniquely melancholic atmosphere. An Elephant Sitting Still will remain the eternal debut of young director Bo Hu, who took his own life just before the premiere. An act that becomes symbolic of this deeply human portrait of people in a society that is becoming increasingly selfish, and where life, even in a small Chinese village, is increasingly pressured by economic forces. A remarkable debut reminiscent of the work of Kieslowski and Béla Tarr. The film was described in The New Yorker as ‘one of the great achievements of recent cinema’ and received the Jury Prize at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival.