"Imperfect Zhou Min'an" started with a post-screening question.
Min On Chow was shortlisted for the New York Film Festival with his short film "I'm Not Perfect Enough". After the applause ended, someone in the audience asked her: How many of the scenes in the film about inferiority, wandering, intimacy, and women's plight came from her?
She didn't answer immediately.
Because this movie was not written in a vacuum. Many years ago, she stood on a set after the rain, filming a short film to apply for film school. At that time, she was not sure whether she could become a director, but she vaguely knew that the silent woman in the camera and those unspeakable emotions were all related to herself.
Zhou Minan has been boarding, transferring, and studying abroad since he was a child. He has a life that is generous enough in the eyes of others, but he has always been like a person who was temporarily placed in a different place. Later, she came to an art school in New York to study film, and began to truly enter the creative process: taking classes, writing scripts, forming a crew, viewing locations, shooting, and editing, from course short films to graduation works. Each short film is like looking back, illuminating her sensitivity, desire, dependence, loss of control and self-doubt more clearly.
This is a slow-burning realistic novel about studying abroad. It writes about the real and trivial creative ecology of film schools, and also about aspects of life of international students that are rarely seen: the sense of suspension in foreign identities, misjudgments in intimate relationships, the proximity and alienation of friendships, and the obsession of young creators with self-expression. Love, friendship, family and ambition all take place in it, but the center of the story is always Zhou Minan - how a young girl turned the most imperfect parts of herself into a work bit by bit.
Concept: "Imperfect Zhou Min'an" uses the rare life of an overseas student in film school as an incision to describe how a young girl gradually sees her true self while studying in a foreign country, having intimate relationships, creative dilemmas and self-doubt. The work does not describe studying abroad as a simple narrative of success or suffering, but focuses on those young people who are not lacking in material resources but still find it difficult to place themselves: they have choices, but are still confused; they seem to be free, but they are constantly trapped by the eyes of others and the standards of "excellence." Zhou Minan's growth is not to become a perfect person, but to learn to admit his imperfections and transform those unspeakable loneliness, brokenness and sensitivity into his own expression.
