VERDICT: Shuli Huang’s intensely personal and moving diary film is like a heart-wrenching exploration of – and possibly coda to – his relationship with his mother.
During the pandemic, Shuli Huang returned to China from New York and purchased a Super 8 camera with which he captured moments of his day-to-day life. In his new film, Will You Look At Me, he combines fragments of this material with other archival imagery – namely family photographs – and audio, including personally recorded reflections and conversations with his mother. In bringing together these various elements, Huang attempts to craft a cinematographic letter to his family conveying his personal truth of being a gay man, something that has otherwise felt beyond his powers of articulation.
The juxtaposition of sun-kissed celluloid imagery with the difficult realities behind nostalgic family photos is something that has become familiar in diaristic – or ‘personal camera’ – work of this type. Here, the construction feels slightly different as Huang is not mining an archive of old home videos to undermine their naiveite or faux contentment. Instead, in Will You Look At Me, the quality of the physical film places these contemporary moments within a projection of the past that suggests, with the film’s materiality, a kind of stasis. Here, lives being lived in the present remain rooted in the modes of decades past. This same tension becomes clear, over the course of several audio conversations with his mother, in the way Huang’s contemporary lifestyle strains against the expectations of his parents and their generation.
However, this is not a film that relies upon its theoretical underpinnings to make its points, as the intimacy of the recordings Huang bravely includes, catapult us directly into the middle of these tensions. In one particularly heart-wrenching scene, apparently recorded during Chinese New Year in 2021, Huang and his mother have an impossibly challenging conversation that lays bare the gaping wounds on both sides and makes the family’s long-term reconciliation feel almost impossible to conceive of. While audience members may find it difficult to hear some of the things said by his mother, Huang’s film treats her and her position with tender compassion. If this film is, in some sense, a letter of farewell, it also clings desperately to the hope that it won’t be.
Director, screenplay, cinematography, producer: Shuli Huang
Editors: Shuli Huang, Yang Yang
Sound: Nicolas Verhaeghe
Production company: Exposed Pictures (China)
Venue: Le Semaine de la Critique, Cannes (Short Film Competition)
In Mandarin
20 minutes
