Icarus Film will be teaming up with The KimStim
Collection on Dec. 10 for the domestic home entertainment launch of filmmaker
Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still. Both DVD and Blu-ray editions will be
available on that date.
It has been a long and winding road to market for
this award-winning film from Chinese filmmaker Hu Bo. It opened at the Berlin International Film
Festival in February of last year, where it won the Forum FIPRESCI Prize and
the Best First Feature Award and was nominated for the Forum C.I.C.A.E. Award.
It was quite the feat for a first-time filmmaker,
especially so for a film that clocks in at a remarkable 230 minutes. The irony is that Hu Bo did not complete his
film, but committed suicide during its production … the film was finished by a
team assembled from China’s FIRST Film Festival.
Once completed, An
Elephant Sitting Still then marched out on an
epic film festival run, pulling down wins at the Hong Kong International Film
Festival, Dublin International Film Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival and
more. Around May of last year KimStim
acquired North American distribution rights and then opened the film theatrically
for a limited arthouse showcase in March of this year.
For the record, the ARR comes in at 277 days.
Somewhere in a remote city in China we meet four of
its residents and follow them over the course of a single day. The four have little in common.
One is a smalltime thug by the name of Yu Cheng
(Zhang Yu — Ciao Ciao, Dying to Survive),
who is rattled by the suicide of his best friend. The next is Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang — Our
Shining Days, The Last
Wish), who runs away when he pushes the school
bully down a flight of stairs. His
schoolmate, Huang Ling (Wang Uvin, aka: Wang Yuwen — Nice to
Meet You), joins him — she’s been
sleeping with the school’s principal. And
finally we have an old man by the name of Wang Jin (Liu Congxi — Her
Father His Father) whose family wants to pack him
off to a retirement facility.
They gather by chance and soon the topic of
conversation turns to the story an elephant, living in the remote border city
of Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia (bordering Russia), who ignores the world and
just sits there. They must see this and
so they set off to find it (think: Stand by Me …
the characters going off in search of a dead body) … a journey of escape, to
see perhaps an imaginary creature, but nonetheless a journey.
An Elephant Sitting Still is
presented in Mandarin with English subtitles.
Also included on the Blu-ray is a short film by Hu
Bo titled Man in the Well.
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