Oxhide II

Oxhide II

2009. China. Directed by Liu Jiayin. In 2005, a 25-year-old Beijing film student issued her startling debut film, Oxhide, a stylized feature film starring her parents as themselves, shot entirely in their tiny apartment. Her self-sufficient follow-up, Oxhide II, takes her highly formalized approach to everyday life even further, depicting her family’s preparation of a dumpling dinner in real time, set across nine distinctly positioned shots around a multi-purpose table. A work of great precision and intimacy, Liu’s film probes deep into deceptively banal surfaces to reveal the sublime mysteries of a Chinese family. Courtesy of dGenerate/Icarus. In Manadarin; English subtitles. 133 min.