France – Biarritz
Awarded the Grand Prix at Biarritz’s new Nouvelles Vagues Festival in early July, A “Song Sung Blue” is the first feature film by 27-year-old Chinese filmmaker Xiao Bai Chuan. Borrowing its title from a Neil Diamond standard, A “Song Sung Blue” follows Xian, a teenager from northeast China who is forced to return to live with her father. There, over the course of a summer marked by the awakening of love and melancholy, she encounters a young Korean woman, free, bold and captivating. A forbidden love, from a young girl to an older woman, in a country where homosexuality remains taboo.
While the film’s social themes – the desires of young people in the face of a traditional society embodied by its elders – are very much present, Xiao Bai Chuan offers a tender, pastel-coloured initiatory tale with which everyone can identify. Who hasn’t experienced the first tingles of desire over the course of a summer, in that pivotal period of adolescence? A “Song Sung Blue” is thus part of an already-established genre of romantic, teenage and summer films, but offers a soft, oriental variation, like a watercolour painting, whose blue colour – that of the cold as well as of the blues – is distilled throughout the film.
© Amanda, Charades
© Banel & Adama
For a young festival like Nouvelles Vagues, whose jury was made up exclusively of artists under 35 – including Iranian filmmaker Saeed Roustaee and French actress Lyna Khoudri – we couldn’t have dreamed of a better Grand Prix.
Pierre Charpilloz
A Song Sung Blue” by Xiao Bai Chuan, in cinemas December 6, 2023