The Water Murmurs

The impact of an asteroid has placed a provincial town in China at immediate risk of destruction in Story Chen’s short film The Water Murmurs, which took home the top prize in Cannes earlier in the year. In this milieu of impending doom, the past comes flooding into the present for Nian (Annabel Yao) as she says goodbye to where she grew up while locals evacuate around her. Despite the high concept premise, the film is less about narrative progression than it is a mood piece about the notion of departure and the ways that our history and our memories are both bound up in, and unleashed, by place.

Inspired by a couplet from Charles Baudelaire’s The Jewels, the film follows Nian as she drifts around her hometown in the few remaining moments that it has left. Submerged roads make her scooter voyage meandering, but she persists in visiting an old friend, Tian (Zhang Taiwen) at her former school, and a café she used to frequent owned by Mr. Peng (Li Rongxi). Nian’s family are preparing to leave the town and the same is true of Tian’s – Nian stops by his apartment the following day to give him a gift, but they have already vacated. For Mr. Peng, there is no life after the deluge. He will, like the captain of a sinking ship, remain, anchored by the memory of his dearly departed wife. Quite whether these events take place chronologically, or even in temporal proximity, is unclear; in certain moments, Nian’s perception seems to shift like the changing tides.

In the film’s opening scene, a group of men gossip on the shoreline, wondering if humanity will return to its fish form when the ocean swallows the town. There is subsequently a recurring swimming motif – in the form of people that Nian observes out in the water, and in shared recollections with Tian – and it seems somehow tied up with the fluid mechanisms of memory that the film explores. The water that is both rising to meet Nian and drenching her as it falls unrelentingly from the sky, seems to channel certain memories. Before long, the places to which the memories of the local people are fettered will be consumed by it completely.

Director: Story Chen
Cast: Annabel Yao, Zhang Taiwen, Li Rongxi
Producers: Li Xiaoyuan, Wang Biaoxia, Han Xiao
Screenplay: Xiaozi Muhua
Cinematography: Xi Bing
Editing: Du Junlin
Music: Oliver Mayo
Sound: Liang Kai, Zhang Yancheng
Production design: Wang Yi
Production companies: T.H Entertainment, Dream Media Group, Hainan Media Player (China)
Venue: HollyShorts Film Festival
In Mandarin
15 minutes