A Tale of the Wind

Joris Ivens is ninety, a documentary maker who spent his life trying to put wind and sea onto film. In this last one he goes to China to shoot the wind. Waiting, struggling for breath, setting a camera up in the desert and watching nothing happen: the film records all of that too. Ivens directed it together with his wife Marceline Loridan-Ivens. It mixes documentary and fiction freely, running Chinese mythology and opera scenes through it and even nodding to Méliès's Trip to the Moon. It plays like a director looking back over his own life and trade. What it is finally about is not wind but spending a lifetime chasing something that cannot be filmed.