ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES

In the post-apocalyptic mid-21st Century, the Gui Dao sect rules continental Asia. Zhuai and his younger brother Mian are captured and sent to Camp Prosperity, so that their dissident minds can be re-educated. They soon discover that camp life is more than just propaganda, bureaucratic annoyance and trafficking. When the sect is suddenly overthrown, Zhuai and Mian experience total freedom for the first time in many years. When he falls for pretty Xuelan, Zhuai takes her and her small boy to a nearby deserted industrial city. They settle in an abandoned apartment and try to rediscover life’s small and quirky pleasures. But nobody knows what it is to live a normal life again.

After Love Will Tear Us Apart, presented in official selection at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, All Tomorrow’s Parties is the second film of promising young Chinese director Yu Lik Wai. Shot with digital cameras, his attractive and sophisticated feature shows a bleak future vision of Asia and gives us a hard-hitting digression on human relations. The message is clear. Whether we have learned from history or not, we are bound to make the same mistakes again.