Air Base

The title refers to a pond in Wuhan, China that local anglers frequent, but where they can’t catch any fish. The film depicts several individuals’ strange behaviors in public spaces and their internal struggles.

After a debut feature-length film staged as a visit to the zoo in Toronto, Canada, where he lives, Luo Li made his next three films, including Emperor Visits the Hell (2012) and Li Wen at East Lake (2015), in Wuhan where he grew up, with the friends and family he had left there, composing with them complex and playful stories spanning reality, fiction and myth. This new film is again set in Wuhan, which is now known as the place where a global epidemic originated. The virus is never directly mentioned in the film but is obviously floating in the air, even in the title whose military tone is only partly a joke. The airbase it refers to is in fact simply a pond where Li’s angler friends usually catch nothing but wind. This ecosystem recalls the omnipresence of water, jetties and different nature scenes that border the riverbanks in his previous films, flowing like malleable rivers where recurring elements constantly form new compositions. But this is the landlocked, controlled, contained version.  The city becomes the large-scale projection of the base; its form reverberates in the patterns of a draughtsboard, a clock, a bicycle wheel, a frisbee, a roller coaster, amnesia, incarceration. Caught in this invisible cage, the characters perform intriguing and poetic actions, regulate the flow of traffic and passers-by like an orchestra conductor, carry out a field survey to collect the population’s sighs, or draw mysterious fishhooks on walls. The image of a broom hurtling down an escalator is reminiscent of the image in I Went to the Zoo the Other Day (2009) of a bird in flight in a freefalling cage. Who can say whether we are free or captive, whether we are flying or falling?

Antoine Thirion