What to watch in the virtual fest: I can’t believe I unfortunately made a mistake with this film as well and forgot to slot it in even though it’s one of my favorites, so I definitely wanted to highlight it. Gently Down the Stream is one of the most distinctive films I’ve seen about bipolar disorder, a topic near and dear to my heart, in the festival. I think a lot of its originality and odd tonal shifting is derived through a cultural lens I don’t fully understand by the Chinese writer-director-producer Lipei “Allison” Yu, but it works perfectly for this particular illness. It’s much less dour than many films on this topic, at times almost celebrating manic thinking and its ability to jump around and make interesting connections and colorful perceptions. There’s even a quirky musical number and a scene that breaks the fourth wall.
The performances from the young women in the film are sad and poetic in their naivete and promise never fulfilled, and they typify the kind of women the director said inspired the film. Young, brilliant women others struggled to understand, whose lives ended just as they were about to really start. The film’s attitude about this phenomenon feels different from so many I’ve seen, in that there is just a radical acceptance that this is sometimes a natural result of the bipolar lifecycle. As the director says in her statement, “A life can be long or short, but it’s splendid nevertheless.”
You will not want to miss the completely unique short film Gently Down The Stream, now playing in Shorts Block No. 5 and closing out the virtual festival.
https://watch.eventive.org/…/play/6704b2b8dd02d60047462b6c
