Spring Festival Screenings of Daphne Xu’s “Huahua’s Dazzling World and Its Myriad Temptations”
Daphne Xu’s film, Huahua’s Dazzling World and Its Myriad Temptations, continues its festival run with screenings at the Museum of Moving Image First Look Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Athens International Film and Video Festival in March and April.
Saturday March 18 at 8pm
Museum of Moving Image First Look Festival, New York, NY
Friday, March 24 at 9pm
Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anne Arbor, MI
Wednesday, April 12, 5:30 PM
Friday, April 14, 1:15 PM
Athens International Film and Video Festival, Athens, OH
Huahua’s Dazzling World and Its Myriad Temptations
Dir. Daphne Xu. China/Canada/U.S. 2022, 82 mins. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
In Xiong’an New Area, a government-planned city just south of Beijing, the earthy, energetic Huahua ekes out a life for herself and her family by livestreaming on the video-sharing app Kuaishou. Dancing and singing with a hustler’s desperate stamina, employing facial beauty filters while chatting gruffly with her followers, she projects herself into an idealized, virtual world without ever fully transcending the drab, domestic drudgery she daily occupies. Composed almost entirely of long takes, whose compositions position Huahua firmly within and relative to her physical and social environment, Xu’s film lays bare the irreconcilable distance between the self on screen and the self in space.
