Breathless Animals is a poetic documentary. A kind of photo film where of course, photos move or objects in photos move with the help of editing. So it could rise this question again: What is a motion picture?

The director Lei Lei uses different materials: photos, slides and film in order to tell fragments from her life in the sixties and seventies, and to tell the story of her childhood, of her family and the society that she lived in, in 1970s and 1980s. Through her story, we have a journey through history, that shows a conflict between tradition and modernity and how life has changed over the years in China.

The movie gives informations about Chinese culture and it’s history. It is an episodic film and well structured. You have many photos of different objects that we use or people in China use in their ordinary life from different angles: bicycles, bathrooms, beds, sheets, chairs and then the city: streets, markets, people, sidewalks and so on. From them you can see the architect of the city. The photos have a great sense of aesthetic. The promotional billboards on the walls in streets are something that gets the attention. On one for example we see an ugly image of a happy family with one child. The picture was painted on the wall in one of the main streets in Beijing and below was written: Only one child is enough. The photos actually looked a lot like Chinese paintings.

The director had access not only to an interesting archive but also he had a great amount of old personal photos and materials. I could not of course get all the cultural references. I have to do some research in order to get into details about the political and social events of the 1970s and 80s in China.

The director Lei Lei looks critical at media and TV, he uses successful motion picture as a medium to represent Chinese culture differently in comparison with how media and TV represents it. The form and content work well together, a part from sound that was in some parts annoying. However, the music was nice.

A part from what is written above, the film does not have really something special to say. In my opinion, it was not at all an experimental movie like advertised by the filmmaker herself. The director did not experiment something new with its material in terms of story telling. And therefor, I found the film weak for Berlinale. We can definitely find many better films with the same style and in the category of experimental photo films.

I guess Breathless Animals is not a movie that the majority will like because of the way the story is told. I am personally interested in photo films and art house movies but Breathless Animals is not a film that I can give so much credits too. I did not like it much because I could not see much of creativity in it.

Text by Amir Akbari