Bai Niao

It was summer, for the very first time. Hot and heavy humidity hangs over the small town in the Chinese south. Luo is HIV positive. He lives alone. His family lives a few blocks away. At a family get together he meets a distant female cousin visiting from the United States of America. They are attracted to one another's loneliness. The pace of the film corresponds with the heat of the city. The director fuses his protagonists with the routine of the city, subverting the dividing line between documentary and fictive components – and thereby allowing for a glimpse at the in between. (Berlinale)