Synopsis
A mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind window into modern China, People’s Park is an exhilarating single shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms, and performances coexisting in tight proximity within the park’s prismatic social space. A sensory meditation on cinematic time and space, People’s Park offers a fresh gaze at public interaction, leisure and self-expression in today’s China. People’s Park was produced at Harvard’s groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has been responsible for some of the most critically-acclaimed documentaries of recent years (including Leviathan, and Manakamana).
A word from Tënk
People's Park is a film experienced in two movements, depending on the posture the viewer adopts, and the strength of its cinematic device impresses precisely through its ability to let us sway from one perspective to another, from the macro to the micro, freely and without effort.
There is first this teeming mass of human beings that imposes itself on our gaze. With 21 million inhabitants, the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu lives up to its name as a megacity. The camera's movement, patient and sovereign, invites us to perceive the park as an ecosystem, in its entirety, buzzing like a hive in full swing where people dance, walk, eat, sing, chat, paddle, and lounge, swallowed up in the crowd. The park's rich soundscape, for that matter, is relentless.
Yet as soon as our gaze detaches itself from the camera's frame to pierce the anonymity of these individuals, the portrait changes at once. The mass is restless, but the citizens who compose it are surprisingly at ease. Hidden within the chaos lies a multitude of personal temporalities, peaceful for the most part, to which the camera's own is added. Slow and observant, it obscures itself as much as it inhabits the landscape. It navigates the chaos without ever letting us forget that it, too, is part of it. Before us unfolds a kind of tacit understanding between the chaos of the mass and the gentleness of the intimate. All coexist, not through compromise, but as though the presence of each were necessary to the survival of the whole.
Jason Todd
Programmer and filmmaker
