BEST OF THE FEST - PROGRAMMER’S PICK

”In a daring departure from his previous documentaries chronicling Chinese pro-democracy interventions and more direct social issues, director Rikun Zhu shifts to interrogating how art, filmmaking, and internal and external immigration for Chinese youth might deploy an expressive, intimate form of activism. A skillfully executed observational documentary, NO DESIRE TO HIDE goes inside the bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and dreams of young filmmaker Wu Haohao, a devoted Maoist enfant terrible filmmaker who desires to emigrate to the capitalist West and his girlfriend, dancer Ge Ningning.

The film twists and torques contradictions between fiction and documentary, performance and naturalism, observation and intrusion, China and the West, Maoism and capitalism, feminism and patriarchal sexism, exploitation and collaboration, refusing to resolve any of them—and leaving the audience disturbed and questioning.”

 —Patricia Zimmermann, Director, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival