Panda

Xinyang Zhang, a past winner of Jia Zhangke’s Next Talent Project scholarship, arrives with one of the most exciting Chinese debuts of recent times, a grimy and glorious epic set along the banks of the Yangtze River. A recent Berlinale premiere, Panda follows the wanderings of four characters: a poet with a gift for connection, a drifter obsessed with dragons, a man grieving the loss of his wife (and of his finger), and a lost young woman. Liminal figures in multiple senses, social outcasts lost in their memories, each is seeking salvation, perhaps in mythic terms. Two and a half hours of tenacious and hardscrabble veracity, conveyed in magisterial compositions, steeped in classical Chinese themes, and enlivened by a protean formal imagination, Panda has the beguiling vastness of a multithreaded magical-realist novel.