Still, Forward and Looking Back

Qili Xu

China / 2025 / Experimental / 9’46”I2605347

1 BO Images Trealer

SYNOPSIS

This short film is connected to a journey, and it is also inseparable from my hometown—Wuhan. In the late 1950s, the first steel conglomerate built after the founding of New China was located in Qingshan District, Wuhan. It brought about massive industrial migration of families and gave rise to a fully equipped workers’ residential community. Today, however, this steel fortress is gradually rusting and failing; the neighborhood where I once lived has vanished. Yet it is this past that constructs the reality in my memory. This short film is about that irretrievable past. I transform the memories of these changes into a montage of collaged images, in which frames are blurred and distorted in disorderly ways, questioning an endpoint that can never truly be reached. This journey originates from the past and is heading somewhere unknown, its destination still unclear. It may be diluted, it may dissolve. The journey is the search and advance itself, and also an unreachable past. It exists within the fissure between reality and expectation. Through this short film, I seek to retrace the temporalities of the past in order to comprehend the present; and also try to connect with a more universal condition—one in which, within grand historical narratives, we are compelled to move forward and remain open, while continually returning to the minute individual existence.

GÉNÉRIQUE