From November 11 to December 13, 2020 the International Short Film Festival Interfilm took place online on the German streaming platform Sooner. The extensive program, with several competitions and numerous thematic sections, also included a selection of short films from China. With a total of seven entries, the festival provided an insight into the country's diverse current film production. The title of the special program was “China New Talents.” The submissions came from art schools and were intended to give budding filmmakers the opportunity to compete in an international context.
Keyi Zhang captured a poetic mood in his approximately 12-minute feature film “Si Fan”, which focuses on young people and confronts them with beliefs in traditions and myths. A group of young soldiers are stationed in the countryside to survey and geologically study the area. Bin is one of them. On one of their explorations, they meet a young woman who leads Bin to a river. But the map does not show the river. Bin's colleagues and his supervisor do not believe him. The river reveals itself only to Bin, because it connects him with his deceased great love.
Laconically and relying on the sensual effect of nature shots, Keyi Zhang tells a love story marked by pain and rejection. In a compact way, he manages to create a sovereign aesthetic unity on a formal level through an independent image finding, which he owes to the camera work of Chris Song. In terms of content, “Si Fan” tackles a variety of different themes such as discrimination, shame and grief.
Zhang combines the harshness of the plot with a surrealistic-fantastic touch that leads to an emotional balance in the film. Short shots and a fast narrative rhythm ensure that the pathos of the story does not become too heavy. The strength of “Si Fan” is the combination of current social and universal issues with Zhang's own interpretation of legends from his cultural background.
