Listen to the Moon

Shile Feng holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the CAFA Art Academy in China and a master’s degree in Film from LUCA School of Arts in Belgium. She has directed an experimental short film The Resistance of Amnesia (2020) and a fiction short Peipei (2023).

A word from the selection committee :
Following closely in Xiaoyue’s footsteps, Shile Feng’s camera strives to make us feel her connection with a new environment, the big city where she hopes to build a life of her own, far from the comforting, yet – as a phone call hints at – stifling, family circle. This evolving relationship with space and with the different ways to inhabit it – a symptom of late capitalism that seems to shape every form of interaction, since Xiaoyue’s encounters are confined to those linked to her day job – dictates the key structures of the mise-en-scène, where tones shift effortlessly. From the humour that surfaces in the cramped storeroom where the workers cross paths, eat, and chat, to the sensuality that emanates from a nightclub dance floor. Yet it is under the open sky, twice, that the film moves us to our core: in the surge of joy and freedom that two women find on the road in the dead of night, and in the infinite sadness of a lonely worker, in cosplay, lost in an anonymous crowd.

Victor Bournerias