Electric Shadows

A young man delivering water by bicycle is attacked, for no reason he can see, by a mute woman he has never met; both he and the bicycle come off badly. As she is taken into custody she asks him to feed her fish, and when he lets himself into the small flat he finds a place given over entirely to the cinema. Xiao Jiang’s first film turns back from there and tells some forty years, from the Cultural Revolution to the early eighties, through a family living beside an open-air cinema in the countryside. She wrote the screenplay with Cheng Qingsong. The title is a literal rendering of dianying, the Chinese word for cinema. The record credits the director as Jiang Xiao, the same name in Chinese order, while sources use Xiao Jiang; the record also dates it 2005 where sources treat it as a 2004 production.