About the pink cocoon

As my elder sister Jiao awaits childbirth in a pink maternity ward, speculation and expectation from women of four generations in my family superimpose and collide with their physical throes and haunting memories.

The cocoon at the centre of this debut film is not, albeit more or less, what we think. It is not the realm of babies but that of mothers’, which is less well known, more mysterious. What runs through the heads of parturients? asks Binyu Wang as he watches his sleeping sister in the film’s opening shot, in the maternity clinic where she is preparing to give birth. The absurdly pink walls of her room enwrap her sleep in a strange silky atmosphere. We might imagine her in a bubble, as transparent as it is opaque. Sheltered in the bubble, she sleeps like a nymph, deep inside herself, exhausted even before giving birth. In fact, at the same time as a child, another birth has begun, a mother is about to see the light of day on the remains of a young girl. So, this is the pink cocoon and the reason for the film: the filmmaker has come to watch his sister’s metamorphosis, the advent of motherhood. And also see that there is a misleading solitude in this cocoon: the bubble gradually becomes populated, soon invaded by women who enter through the bedroom door (sisters, aunts, grandmothers, squeeze aroung the bed) or are taken off-screen in a few childhood memories (of an absent mother, the mother-in-law who replaced her), as this childhood is taking its last breath, in the bubble. On the margin of this gynaeceum, on the edges of the pink room, the few men of the family remain discreet, left at the door of the cocoon. The birth happens in a barely perceptible ellipsis: a tiny homonculus suddently appears in the arms of his sister, now a mother. In her brother’s film, she will find a memory of her metamorphosis and a highly sensitive document on motherhood – as a place and a destiny.

Jérôme Momcilovic