Sometimes the tempo kinda lost me but the film still managed to keep me hooked. The shots/scenes not making sense at the first glance somehow make sense in its “twins tower” structure. This is probably the most impressive thing this film does: it captures a sense of deja vu in the variations of repetitions. Not necessarily fixated on the classic trope of remembering and forgetting but brings in the discussion of the emerging reality-altering and vertically-integrated digital identity in Chinese urban citizenship. When the birds chirping are prerecorded and snowflakes are just manufactured façades of led screens, when our encounters are registered in the digital catalogs and within those encounters we reproduce more digital traces with endless photos and clips, when the delivery guy even questions if he is a document, how do we re-examine our memory and existence in relation to the worlds’s most seriously reckless marching towards the reproduction and consumption of digital era and digital identities? It seems that the film’s stance is critical but not critique. The ending probably says it all. When you wanna call someone, don’t call the person on your screen; you call them by directing looking at them with your eyes and you call their name by heart.
Feb 5, 2025, Aller-Retour影展，Paris
