WHERE THE SUN SETS
日落之地 (2020)
A Co-directing Short Film with Danni Chen
合作导演彩色短片，17:20
“Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases.”(Cees Nooteboom, 1992)
过去，对于你来说，是什么？
记忆对我们每个人来说都无比的重要，它是我们意识存在的根本。我们所感知到的“过去”存在于我们的意识中，通过“记忆”使得世界紧密联系在一起，事物就成为了不可分割的整体。过去的自己其实成为了另一个实体，对现在的我来说，她是如同幽灵一般的最熟悉的陌生人，是现在的我们的二重身（double）。
电影给予了我无数个美好的时空旅行，而我也越来越想要成为那个掌舵的人。在这个项目中，我想要以电影创作者的身份把自己传送到过去，同时从编剧的角度去与过去的自己对话，去寻找我的“雾中风景”。在我编写剧本之前，我与一起搭档的danni观看了许多有关于“世界上的另一个我”的电影，如Double Life of Veronique, Love Letter (1995) 与 Soulmate (2016)。在《情书》中，两个长相相同的女孩因为一封多年前的情书联系在了一起，这给予了我很大的灵感创作这部短片的剧本。
剧本的主要故事围绕着国际留学生林西展开, 她刚刚搬到一个新的公寓并且无意间发现了一个前房客留下的盒子。她看了盒子里的信件后，决定启程去归还这份美好的回忆。在旅途中，她遇到了一个一直想去穆萨岛看日落的女孩苏升。苏升的身份是模糊不清的，她的身份可以被观众自由揣摩。在白天与黑夜交替之时，日落之地是她们真正认识的地方，其实也是她们共同想去的地方，它是归属地，也象征着新的开始。
What does your past mean to you?
Memory is incredibly important to all of us, and it is the foundation of our conscious existence. The past that we perceive exists in our consciousness, and the world is bound together by memory, and things become an indivisible whole. The person I used to be has become a different entity, and to me now, she's the ghost of the most familiar stranger, our double.
The movie has given me a lot of wonderful time travel, and I increasingly want to be that person at the helm. In this project, I want to be a filmmaker who can transport myself to the past, and at the same time talk to myself from the writer's point of view, to find my "landscape in the mist“. Before I wrote the script, my group member Danni and I watched a number of films about my "other self in the world, " such as Double Life of Veronique, Love Letter and Soulmate. These films used unique ways to create connections between two "selfs" . In Love Letter, two identical girls were linked by a Love Letter from years ago, which inspired me to write Where the Sun Sets.
The main story revolves around international student Lin, who has just moved into a new apartment and stumbled across a box left behind by a former tenant. After reading the letter in the box, she decided to return the memory. On her trip, she met a girl, Sue, who had always wanted to see the sunset in Mousa. Their relationship is ambiguous and the identity of Sue can be predicted freely by the audiences. When the day and night meets, sunset is where they really know each other and where Lin and Sue want to reach eventually. It is where they belong, and it is also a symbol of a new beginning.
