Dragonfly Eyes, Chinese artist Xu Bing’s first foray into feature-length filmmaking, is a direct glimpse into what the future of cinema might be.
Celebrated as a successful visual artist before turning to film, Bing has now harnessed his energy into a ground-breaking and unconventional project. Most obvious, is the foundation for the film itself – 80 minutes of fictional drama formed out of over 10,000 hours of cloud-based surveillance camera footage.
Everything in this film has happened ahead of time, and Bing and his obsessive editing team use it to their advantage by uncannily isolating awe-inspiring clips sure to leave indelible impressions on audiences for years.
Dragonfly Eyes looks and feels like nothing else ever created before. It is sinisterly dystopian and quietly tender. People are at once reduced to cogs in a faceless machine, yet stand as essential actors in the universal struggle for existence and identity. While our outcome is constantly being defined by our technological breakthroughs, we never lose the desire to remain human.
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Dragonfly Eyes is screening four times in the Wavelengths program of the Toronto International Film Festival. Information about the film and its showtimes can be found on the TIFF website, here.
Trailer below:
That is … … horrific, is the only word that comes to mind.
Definitely a very disturbing watch in both the images on the screen and the meanings behind it.