A Chaotic Dream

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves.

A documentary chronicle that follows a number of denizens of the underground as they drift around individually and collectively, looking for (and speculating upon) a new cultural ‘scene’. The post-punk music they love proclaims slogans of resistance and revolution, but what we see is the groping for a sustainable lifestyle familiar from much youth culture worldwide. That lifestyle, in this case, involves queer sexual identity, drugs, ephemeral relationships, patched-together fashions, weighty discussions of art and theory, the tasting of foods, and copious amounts of alcohol

A documentary of underground music culture in Beijing