Red Amnesia

Deng is a retired widow whose days run to a fixed order: she takes food to her sons, involves herself in their households, and nobody has asked her to. Then the phone calls start. Whoever is calling does not speak and does not want anything. As Deng tries to work out what the silence is, something out of the past comes to the surface. Wang Xiaoshuai's Chinese film screened in competition at Venice. The director counts it as the last part of a trilogy with Shanghai Dreams and 11 Flowers; what the three share is the debt the years of the Cultural Revolution left behind. Lü Zhong plays Deng. The film neither accuses nor absolves; its subject is forgetting itself.