Remember Zhang Yimou‘s “One Second”? The film, the director's self-confessed love letter to cinema, was supposed to screen at Berlin Film Festival last year but was pulled at the last minute, citing “technical difficulties”, which of course these days translates as having run afoul with the Chinese censors. Hope was dwindling of this project ever seeing the light of day, particularly since Zhang has since moved on to direct the urban crime thriller “Under the Light“, his spy espionage thriller “Impasse” as well as the rural China set comedy “My Beloved Hometown“. However, it seems that “One Second” finally seems to have been given the green light from the Censors and is now scheduled to release in China on November 27th, 2020. Interestingly, the new cut runs just a minute shorter than the original runtime cited during the Berlinale, but this is after the crew had to return to previous locations to shoot brand new footage to replace the one that had been mutilated by the Censors.
Synopsis
An ex-con (Zhang Yi) and young woman (Liu Haocun) are bound together by parallel pursuits of an enigmatic film reel, one of the countless propagandistic news reels that were transported across the countryside during that time for the entertainment and political edification of rural villagers. The man, recently escaped from a Cultural Revolution prison farm, has reason to believe the reel contains a glimpse — lasting just a single second — of his beloved, deceased daughter. The girl carries her own desperate motives stemming from personal loss and a hoped-for glimmer of redemption.
