May 16 – 19:00
King’s College London, Strand Campus
China, 2026
Directed by
Zhou Zhenyu
Running time
14 minutes
The film was shot on a 16mm military film stock called ‘Lucky,’ manufactured in China during the Cold War period and still used today.
In the director’s hometown, Hengshui, in northern China, a shopping centre that was never completed has been left abandoned. Wild plants grow in the building’s interstices. Local residents have taken over certain spaces, transforming them into leisure areas for ping-pong, dance, boxing, and more.
One day, from his window, Zhou Zhenyu noticed that a once upright wild tree had tilted over, as if dying on the roof. History stains his walls.
The walls besiege the future homo sapiens in a fostered full metal jacket — the membrane of remembrance. Time is the final mark of collective surveillance. The mother is in pain. The city is a concrete thing.
The city is an abstract thing. Postmodernism has surged ahead into a thriving wasteland of ruins. The plantation cannot be controlled. The crowds marvel at the killing of flesh, pierced by neon tubes. The patriarchy is in agony.
We the people are invisible in the city. They the people are the city.
– Antonio Guo
Meet the director
Zhou Zhenyu is an artist working in film and video installations. His autobiographical films depict landscapes and people that have been overlooked in the modernisation process of contemporary Chinese society. Both actor and observer of his own work, he explores the relationships between his subjects and himself.
Meet the crew
Cinematographer and editor
Zhou Zhenyu
Writers
Wanda Ford, Zhou Zhenyu
Sound design
Xu Mo
Music
Branger
Colour grading and mixing
Clovis Stocchetti
