Yumen = Yumen

"A collaboration between two Chinese artists, Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang, and acclaimed American filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, Yumen is a documentary-fiction hybrid that tells the story of a ghost town - Yumen, in China's western Gansu province - through a series of wandering characters and inventive vignettes. Produced with the support of Harvard's groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab (People's Park, co-directed by Sniadecki, Leviathan, Sweetgrass and the upcoming Manakamana). Filmed in and around a once-thriving, oil-rich town that has since been left depleted and derelict, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist, and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection and a collective past among the town's crumbling landscape. One part "ruin porn," one part ghost story, and shot entirely on 16mm, the film brings together narrative gesture, performance art, and socialist realism into a crude and radiant collage that not only plays with convention and defies genre, but also pays homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium"--Container.