Norman Atun
To celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Cannes Film Festival invited around thirty filmmakers to create three-minute short films to compose the collective film Chacun son cinema. Tsai Ming-liang proposed a twinned piece with his feature Goodbye, Dragon Inn, an exploration of the movie theater as a public space and collective experience. Shortly after, Tsai put on this new version of the piece, twenty minutes longer, which was presented at the Venice Biennale.
Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to each other, sounds dominate: coughing, cooking, coupling, opening bags; music and news reports on a radio, the rattle and buzz of a restaurant. It's dark in the city at night. We see down hallways, through doors, down alleys. Who sleeps with whom?
