QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE

A man rests his head. He travels inside a coach at night. His name is Anong. He returns to his native Lao with Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, one of the giants of Asian cinema. The 67-year-old opts for sheer intimacy. There is no film crew. And he has little more than a small Canon camcorder and a Laica camera to hand. The whole endeavour lasts just 65 minutes – virtually a short film if compared to the duration of well over two hours of Ming-liang’s Face (2009), Stray Dogs (2013), and Days (2020), at 138 and Face (2009). It consist almost exclusively of images of the impoverished community that Anong once left.

There is no contextualisation whatsoever. The director never reveals that the film was made in Lao, the name os his protagonist, the date and the reason why he left and returned. And there is no storyline. A political connotation is even more elusive. Back Home is a combination of slow and sensory cinema, a film that’s to be contemplated almost exclusively for its setting, and the richness of the audiovisual textures. The camera is entirely still, and each sequence lasts about one minute. The audio is precarious: you can hear the wind blow through the camera microphone (audio engineers will shudder at the absence of a dead cat). Ming-liang is unconcerned about these technical issues. His focus is exclusively on spontaneity and authenticity. He calls this approach “hand-sculpted cinema”.

The derelict houses, dirt roads, small ponds and wild flowers suggest a place of poverty and apparent peace. There are a few human activities: people make food, labourers sculpt large Buddha statues. Ming-liang opts to have his film entirely devoid of subtitles, leaving viewers to guess the nature of the few discernible conversations, while also preventing the development of a plot.

For many years, Ming-liang has been working with audiovisual installations, often including long observational videos. One such exhibition took place in Locarno two years ago, when the director received a lifetime achievement prize (read our exclusive interview here). Back Home feels like a continuation of this non-theatrical work rather than a stand-alone movie per se. The experience is immersive, meditational and extremely relaxing. It just isn’t very cinematographic.

Back Home just premiered in the 82nd edition of the Venice International Film Festival.