Shadows in Mulan
SHEN Ruilan • 2019
The animation is about a letter from a south city. The inspiration comes from senior from my hometown, who talks about the description and fantasy about the last decade. Combined with the odd stories, the movie depicts the status of a coming night. Before everything occurs, there are only hints, metaphors, and the urge in the dark night. At that time, people in my hometown could not tell some of the truth, and they lived with tense relationships between them. Then some incidents evolved into bizarre legends. Now, the light in the city has driven away the darkness in the countryside, while those legends still exist there.
CAST & CREW
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
SHEN Ruilan
Director
Shadows in Mulan originated from the oral accounts of some elderly people in my hometown of local legends. In depicting these stories, they also tell of the suspicions, doubts and struggles between people in the 1950s and 1960s, when the whole social environment was changing, and when the two were combined, ghosts and monsters became a metaphor and a secret language, through which stories that could not be told were “reborn”.