Following its world premiere at the Berlinale and its U.S. premiere at Art of the Real, Breathless Animals constantly surprises and unsettles the viewer by keeping the titular animals off-screen—within the cadence of the speaker’s nonlinear memory. In this intimate, yet hypnotic, fictional “reconstruction” of what his mother experienced and dreamt about in her youth (the first television, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath…), award-winning Chinese filmmaker Lei Lei brilliantly pushes the boundaries of experimental animation through an arresting, discrete emotional montage of archival photographs, newsreels and sound recordings, collected, reframed, processed and recontextualized.
In person: Lei Lei