Mrs. Fang
(Mrs. Fang)

When reality becomes that of a woman unable to move or express herself due to the onset of an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s, lying on a bed that is already her death bed, what truth remains for the person filming her? This is the question raised when Wang Bing’s camera films close-ups of the emaciated face of Fang Xiuying, the sixty-year-old inhabitant of an unremarkable fishing village in the Chinese province of Zhejiang. The idea of making a film about her arose when the lightning decline of her health was not yet visible. How can we now know who Mrs Fang was? She is surrounded by her carers, even during the long nights that form the sole rhythm of the film. In just over one week of filming, combining a unique inside setting and a few sombre outside scenes, Wang transforms cinema into an unsettling passage between life and death, where the on-screen ghosts are those that the world’s affairs have left off-screen. AR