The first half of the filming of Lóngquán: The Dragon’s Spring, the debut feature by Catalan director Adrià Guxens, has concluded in China. The film, produced by Pausa Dramàtica Films and La Charito Films, tells the story of Junyi Sun, a Spanish dancer of Chinese descent who has had little contact with his family’s country, having only visited once at the age of seven. Three decades later, after years of rejecting his roots, his mother convinces him to return to reunite with his grandmother, now over ninety years old. This journey reopens old wounds, forcing Junyi to confront and rethink his increasingly fragmented and confused identity.
“Lóngquán is a film about my friend Junyi. We both grew up in Tarragona—he as a racialized person and I as an LGBTI+ individual—and I believe that feeling like we didn’t fit into the ‘normality’ of our time, each in our own way, brought us closer together,” shares Guxens, who admits that this story had been forming long before they even realized it. “Like many in the Asian diaspora, Junyi is seen as a foreigner in Spain but treated as a Westerner in China.” Junyi adds: “If I had understood as a child that my situation was ‘normal’ and that I had no reason to run from my roots out of fear of ridicule, that survival instinct and the need to fit into a group simply because my skin color was different wouldn’t have existed.”
This is the second time Adrià Guxens and Junyi Sun have collaborated, having previously explored these same dilemmas in the short film A Distant Sound, which they now see as the seed of their first feature. For Lóngquán, Guxens has embraced ambiguity, blending documentary with fiction, realism with fantasy, and the Chinese and Spanish worlds. The film oscillates between memories of a childhood trip and the present, immediate reality.
Check out our reviews of Director Guxens’ previous works HERE
