CHA FANG

On a visit to support a human rights activist in Xinyu, the filmmaker discreetly switches on his camera when the police come to “inspect” the hotel room he shares with his companions. In this cramped space-time, the obviously biased police control turns into a scene from the theatre of the absurd around a misunderstanding about Zhu Rikun’s nationality. When a police officer, with the his passport in hand, insistently demands him to give spoken confirmation of his nationality, bureaucratic pavolvism is driven to the brink of slapstick, especially as the ultra-smart team of sleuths, unaware they are being filmed, switch on their own camera… Decapitating some of them, the framing reflects – albeit involuntarily – the robot-like, servile attitude of these headless chickens, the strong arms of power that even forget the meaning of the question they are asking. The effect of this minimal dispositif would be outright comic if it did not reveal, in twenty minutes of real-time footage, the violence of the State’s oppression: its negation of any relationship between cause and effect is a dizzying spiral that a book like Henri Alleg’s La Question or a film like Rithy Panh’s S-21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine also revealed in their time. (Charlotte Garson)