A love triangle 30 years later in the surreal debut of a Singaporean director. Russian premiere as part of the contemporary programme of the Festival of Singular Films.
Dreaming & Dying
- Date:
- 22 Sep 2024,
19:00–20:20
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Hǎo jiǔ bù jiàn
2023, Nelson Yeo
Singapore
77 minutes, Mandarin with Russian subtitles
Starring: Doreen Toh, Peter Yu, Kelvin Ho
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A school reunion is planned at a seaside hotel, but only three people show up. At school they had a love triangle, but now two of the three are married: he is fat and soft, she looks shy and depressed. The third, Heng, whom neither of the others have seen for thirty years, has kept both his youthful air and romanticism—and the unhappy wife finds herself to be attracted to him again. But soon their old friend announces that he is a mermaid with a fish’s tail.
Shot from Dreaming & Dying, 2023
Yeo’s minimalist tour de force is an existentialist meditation as playful as it is profound, as well as one of the most electrifying debuts of recent years.
—Giovanni Marchini Camia, member of the selection committee at the Locarno film festival
The debut by Singaporean Nelson Yeo switches so naturally between reality and dream, the mythological and the ritually religious, and the imagination of the characters and the plot of the novel the heroine is reading, that the boundaries between the layers of the narrative blur a point where they can no longer be distinguished. In his impressively strange work of magical realism, inspired simultaneously by directors such as Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Yeo makes it clear: the secrets of a mature man’s heart are so intricate that sometimes they can only be conveyed by surreal fantasies involving a merman, a talking fish, and a Buddhist ritual.
The screening will begin with a brief speech by the curator in Russian. If you require interpretation into English, please request it at least three days in advance by emailing international@ges-2.org.
The film won the prize for best debut and a Golden Leopard for best film in the programme Concorso Cineasti del presente at the Locarno Film Festival (2023).
