#surreal-cinema

#surreal-cinema

"Resurrection," a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It's more like a love labyrinth-a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish. It's an ecstatic, extravagant work of artifice and imagination, and, from the start, Bi and his collaborators (they include the director of photography Dong Jingsong and the production designers Liu Qiang and Tu Nan) embrace their craft with a childlike sense of wonder and play.

This month, Portland venues will close out summer with a psychedelic swirl of films merging myth and magical adolescence. Teen girls time-travel and chat with dolphins; cosmic heroes emerge from horse goddesses. Meanwhile, here on earth, a sex worker undertakes her own journey from a donut shop to a laundromat in Los Angeles. Screenings are of the "rare" and "for real, don't miss this" varieties, like Gakuryū Ishii's surreal August in the Water, Nobuhiko Obayashi's lesser-known teen dreams, and a little glittery Y2K irony.