How did the inspiration come about for Will You Look at Me? How much of the footage did you shoot on purpose? Did you work on the soliloquy first or after selecting footage?
After I returned to China from New York during the pandemic, I bought a super 8mm camera. I brought it with me everywhere I went, filming people around me without a precise intention in mind. The filming process lasted for almost a year, on and off. I was leading a nomadic life, migrating between different cities and film sets in Beijing, Shanghai, and my hometown Wenzhou. After a few months of drifting elsewhere, it was always a fresh experience to come back to my hometown. To dive once more into my parents’ life and roll the camera, to then embark on a new nomadic cycle where later on I would have the celluloid developed in a lab in Beijing and scanned into digital files. Then after another while, I would return to my hometown again. It was like the film was coming into its own shape. During the Chinese New Year in 2021, my mother and I had an unexpected conversation that switched my film’s narrative. It was the first time that my mother and I spent time with each other after a long period of absence since I had always been unconsciously avoiding facing our relationship. During that conversation, I looked at my mother for the first time in years. I saw deep fears and pains in her eyes where my language and words failed to be reached, where, I realized at that moment, film could be my answer. That’s when this film started to come about. It felt fresh and natural for me to find texts out of the montage of images. And vice versa, texts that grew out of images breathed new possibilities into the creation of images. Therefore, I kept filming during the writing and editing. Everything grows naturally. It was an everlasting process of questioning and exposing myself through cinema. It felt like diving into an honest conversation within myself and taking a long swim into my memory, searching for the roughest truth, which hurts but also heals. 

Are you interested in depicting LGBTQI+ issues specifically or did it come to the film just because reality sets in?
This film came out of my need to discuss my truth with my family, as my letter to my mother. I never had the thought of depicting LGBTQ+ issues specifically. Maybe it’s because I was in it, the materials were too close to myself.

Were you more interested in the question of coming out to parents or in the issue of secrets kept silent outside of the close family circle?
I am more interested in secrets kept silent inside of the close family circle, how we live so closely yet at the same time so far away. 

What’s your favourite short?
Heaven Is Still Far Away  by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.  

What does the Festival mean to you?
A celebration!

Will You Look at Me is being shown as part the Lab Competition L5.