How Is Your Fish Today?

Colour, DIGIBETA
China, United Kingdom, 2006, 83 min
Section: Forum of Independents

Synopsis

A young man in southern China kills his lover. He starts his lonely escape, travelling from one end of the country to the other, until he reaches the promised land of miracles, a snowy village on the northern border. Sitting at his desk in Beijing, a scriptwriter is setting down this man’s story. It is through this story that the former’s life takes on new meaning as he discovers the value of freedom. One day he will embark upon a journey to meet his character and his imagination will blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. This faintly autobiographical tale was written by scriptwriter Rao Hui, who plays himself as well as the main hero of the fictional story he is writing. The film hovers on the borders of fiction, essay and documentary, and mixes various approaches, genres and styles with surprising humour and self-irony.

About the director

Xiaolu Guo (b. 1973) in a fishing village in southern China, started publishing poems when she was 14. Since receiving her M.A. from the Beijing Film Academy, she has published seven books (two of them were translated into Czech). Her screenplay Love in the Internet Age was presented in 1999 with a national award for Best Screenplay. She wrote and directed the documentary The Concrete Revolution (Grand Prix at the International Human Rights Film Festival in Paris, and Special Jury Prize at the EBS International Documentary Festival in Seoul in 2005). How Is Your Fish Today? is her feature film debut (WPRO Tiger Award at the IFF in Rotterdam 2007).