AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL

A radical retelling of the story of Jason and the Argonauts in contemporary China, the feature debut of 29-year-old novelist-cum-filmmaker Hu, a protégé of Béla Tarr, follows teenager Wei Bu over the course of an event-filled day in which, after accidentally critically injuring a school bully, he encounters a succession of disparate characters unified by the fact that they are all mysteriously drawn towards the city of Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia and the fabled pachyderm of the film’s title. A film haunted by the suicide of its author shortly after its completion, AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL is a work brimming with finely rendered individual portraits and acute sociopolitical observations, both a singular triumph for modern Chinese cinema and a melancholy epitaph for Hu.