Echoes of Soul
Tfe Lu
Chine / 2024 / Fiction / 11’2”I2601065
SYNOPSIS
[EN] A gentle breath awakened her. Caught between alienation and intimacy, she sketched stroke by stroke an ideal world and a little black cat. She and the black cat became each other's missing fragments, perpetually weaving tales that completed their individual selves. This short film is a confessional letter I wrote to my past self. For years, I've been adept at filling reality's emotional voids with fantasies—contorted, entangled, afraid to approach—thus completing one-sided romances in my mind, each curtained with lingering regrets. Perhaps the other protagonist never truly existed; everything was an echo chamber where I conversed with my own shadow. This liminal dance between proximity and detachment,clumsy,phantasmal yet separate,,mirrors my relationship with self-spun illusions,and births the film's visual poetry where live-action and animation bleed into each other like watercolor. Love, kinship, friendship—humans persistently stitch themselves whole with relational threads. Now I see: those averted gazes,those whispers of yearning too timid to take shape,were me refracting light through the prism of my soul,gazing at alternate versions of myself suspended in time. "It's alright—you still have you,"this is the heartbeat I wish to amplify through every frame:a manifesto for self-reclamation written in celluloid and stardust.