Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.
Yumen combines ghost stories and “ruin tourism” to form a celluloid psycho-collage of wandering souls seeking connection with one another and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants of the abandoned oil town of Yumen in China’s northwest Gansu province.
Diving into the ruins of a ghost town, this hauntingly disjointed celluloid collage, shot entirely on 16mm, pays tribute to the dying gasps of a medium. A bold, brilliant collaboration between the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan) and two Chinese avant-gardists: Xiang Huang and Xu Ruotao.