Erdos Rider

The UCLA International Institute presents the film, "Erdos Rider," as part of their 2014 China Onscreen Biennial: Spectrum.

Spectrum
World Premiere   2014

Director/Screenwriter/Production Designer/Editor: Wang Haolin
Producer: Sun Kui, Qiu Yijing
Cinematographer: Liu Xiang, Chen Xiaomeng
Composer: Laurent Couson
Cast: He Yufan, Liu Yang, Gandige
HDCAM, color, in Mongolian and Mandarin w/ English s/t, 86 min.

The China Onscreen Biennial and REDCAT are extremely proud to be able to present the World Premiere of Wang Haolin’s latest feature, following the tracks of his award-winning experimental documentary, The Land (2009), praised by the NETPAC jury “for achieving in cinema what is impossible through any other art form by showing how humanity remains unchanged with the passage of time.” Time is indeed the subject of Wang’s cinema, which limns the in-between spaces inhabited by non-Han minorities, de facto breaking down the Grand Narrative of the Chinese nation and its specific post-1949 iteration.

In The Land, Wang was attentive to minute, usually unreported, details. In Erdos Rider, he coins an intriguing, fragmented structure in three parts with secret correspondences between them, that takes us from the wide expanses of Mongolia (in the film’s most lyrical moments) to the confines of a Beijing hotel room (where a wickedly sarcastic scene of sexual mismatch unfolds). Whether rural, desert or urban, the landscapes are crisscrossed by lines of desire and loss, abutting against an oneiric encounter with a white horse. A young lad looks for his little brother; a man looks for a missing archeological team, or maybe for a woman; a woman is looking for something she cannot find in men; once, in the folds of a bygone time, she was looking for a disappeared child; and in the tale about Genghis Khan, mares were looking for their slaughtered colts...

Composing visually breathtaking images while not excluding a healthy sense of humor, Wang elegantly navigates through the multiple levels and locations of his fragmented “story,” asserting himself as an original auteur, and heralding the blossoming of experimental narrative in Chinese independent cinema. – Bérénice Reynaud

Wang Haolin (AKA He Jia), born in 1981 in Kunming, Yunnan Province, currently lives in Beijing. He graduated from the New Media Production Department of the University of Sunderland. During his time in the UK, he made the documentary Apu, about a street band from Peru. After returning to China, he worked as a director and photographer for Explore -Discovery, Greenpeace and Médecins Sans Frontières. In 2006, he formed his own studio Da Di with his friends. In 2007-2008, he worked on the studio’s first production, The Land (2009), about Hmong children. Screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the film received the NETPAC Award.

Preceded by:
Barking

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