An Elephant Sitting Still

Twenty-nine-year-old Bo Hu took his own life in October 2017, four months before the world premiere of his debut film at the Berlinale. In the style of film noir, the Chinese director's work is driven by a fury and captured with a flourish, tracing a panorama of interpersonal and class relations characterized by widespread moral corruption. In a story played out over a single day, a suicide and an incident at a school (one student pushes another student who had been mocking him down the stairs) leads to a series of tragic events. The unfolding spiral of violence pulls in one protagonist after another in this masterfully constructed, multithreaded story: they include a man who feels guilty about a friend's suicide, a girl fighting with her mother, a frightened boy and an old man whose son wants to move out of their cramped house. Everyone fantasizes about escaping from the city, and this desire is embodied by a mythical elephant from the city of Manzhouli: indifferent like a sort of Buddha, it watches the cruelty that people inflict upon one another completely unmoved. Hu Bo provides an extremely pessimistic diagnosis about his country and creates one of the most moving images of lost youth that cinema has ever seen.