ONE SECOND

China, during the Cultural Revolution. A man (Zhang Yi) has escaped from a labour camp and crosses the Gobi Desert to reach a film screening in a village: before the main feature, a newsreel is shown, and in it, for one second, his daughter is said to appear. He arrives too late, follows the reels to the next village, and runs into a neglected girl (Liu Haocun) who steals one of the reels – she needs the celluloid for a lampshade. In the village, the projectionist Fan (Fan Wei), a small king of his own cinema, is waiting, and the newsreel has been damaged in transit. “One Second” by Zhang Yimou, China 2020, is a film about the power of a single image.

Zhang tells the story with tenderness for cinema as a communal event, from the cleaning and mending of the film strip to the audience filling the hall. “One Second” was announced for the 2019 Berlinale competition and withdrawn shortly before its screening “for technical reasons”, which was widely understood as censorship; it only reached Chinese cinemas in 2020. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2021.

Shown at the 2021 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2021 · Film Archive