In 2010, Nan Xin started shooting wedding videos and has been dedicated to short film creation since. Go Fishing is his first short film. It premiered at the FIRST International Film Festival Xining.
NOTICE OF THE COMPETITION COMITEE
Go Fishing kicks off by Miaomiao rekindling her ten-year-long friendship with Li Wei by opening the wrong door. And the audience may well think that they entered the wrong room as well, since Nan Xin dresses his first feature in false whimsy, playing (sometimes literally, since he is the protagonist) with us, by turning his back to the camera. As we gaze intently, however, we quickly discover an offbeat comedy of manners, veiled in Miaomiao’s tantrums and Li Wei’s clumsy naïveté. Their relationship, constantly challenged by social mores, brings a discrete sense of absurdity to Lingbao’s humdrum routine, a city that has been rendered anonymous by their indoor perambulations; we don’t sing at karaoke, don’t eat in restaurants, and even the lake–ultimately, Go Fishing is about "man’s favorite sport"–is empty. In this Chinese chronicle–though location is of little interest–the young and the elderly have disappeared, leaving only strangely idle thirty-year-olds. Go Fishing draws from Hong Sang-soo’s taste for austerity and excess: as characters grapple with slight melancholy, the supposedly banal words that are spoken cannot quite hide the urgency of what is unfolding now, the collective fate of a whole generation.
Vincent Poli
