As you go through life and experience the various physical as well as emotional changes in yourself, so does your home change over time. While the superficial changes in the urban or rural landscape define the most obvious developments, there are those underneath, invisible to the eye of the outsider, but which you, having been born in this environment, notice nevertheless. For a person such as director Shengze Zhu, this must be a mixture of both because her hometown of Wuhan has been through these developments, but also has been at the center of a worldwide pandemic in the last years. However, her documentary “A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces”, which has received the Caligari Film Award at Berlin International Film Festival, is not just about this event, but a very personal tale about the idea of home and, above all, the ever-changing landscape of our memory.
A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces is screening at San Diego Asian Film Festival
Over the course of 87 minutes, we see various impressions of Wuhan, recorded between 2016 and 2019 during various visits of the director in her hometown. Starting with CCTV footage of an empty street during the lockdown of 2020, the feature moves backwards in time showing images of the Wuhan skyline, various festivities, such as the Chinese New Year, along with a few of the many construction sites of the city. Aside from these static, mostly wide-angle shots, there are a few texts inserts, letters (?) from people who have lost their relatives and friends during the pandemic, reminiscing about the memories they shared with that particular person and also how their lives have changed now that someone they loved and cared for is gone forever.
Overall, it is quite difficult to assign the label “documentary” to Shengze Zhu's fourth feature, given the highly personal nature of the project itself and its contemplative approach. “A River Runs … “ does not inform its viewer, but rather remembers and thinks about the images we are presented with. Combined with the aforementioned texts, letters and personal messages, the feature becomes a study of memory itself, which makes the Yangtze River, featured in many of the images, a visual metaphor for the flow of time and the way our mind shifts during the course of our lives. Given the duration of each shot and what it shows, people marveling the city's skyline and the light show on New Year or a single man bathing in the river in the morning, you feel invited to contemplate yourself about memory, loss and life.
In the end, “A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces” is a thoughtful feature about memory. Shengze Zhu manages to engage her viewer in this deeply personal contemplation on time, loss and life, through the slow pace of her film and the composition of each shot.
