COMPOUND EYES OF TROPICAL

FILM INFO

Title in Mandarin

熱帶複眼

Year

2022

Duration

17 min

THEME / GENRE

MUSICAL / FANTASY / ANIMATION

Director

ZHANG XU Zhan

Producer

CHAN Yu-chu

Production Company

Zhan Zhan Xi Qi Culture

Festivals & Awards

2023 Bucheon International Animation Festival (BIAF) – Grand Prize
2023 Animafest Zagreb – SPECIAL AWARD
2023 DOK Leipzig “Partnership Awards – Mephisto 97.6 Audience Award”
2022 Golden Horse Awards – Best Animated Short Film
2021 Deutsche Bank Artists of the Year – ZHANG Xu-zhan

Participation Goal

International Distribution
Festival Screening

Combining stop-motion animation with paper hand crafts from traditional Taiwanese funeral culture. And from the perspective of a fly’s compound eyes, shuttle in a mirror-like fluid narrative.

The film’s stop-motion animation puppets are made using Taiwan’s unique papermaking technique rooted in traditional funeral ceremonies. At the beginning of the film, a shadow puppet mirror transforms into a shaman-like animal dancer. The film uses the perspective of a fly to create a montage film language using the metaphor of the compound eye. Through the use of choreography in the style of the Taiwanese ‘yi zhen’ folk dance, the film portrays the Southeast Asian folktale ‘The Mouse-deer Crossing the River’ through multiple perspectives, reinterpreting the story’s multiple facets across cultures.

The audience views the narrative through the vision of the fly’s compound eye, where the folktale represents a form of container, filled with symbolic metaphors such as the mirror and shadows, reflecting the flow of cultural identity, ethnicity and the transitional nature of local and global contexts. The film interprets cultures from around the world, while appearing to be different on the surface, they in fact reveal a similar structure at their core.

SALES CONTACT

Company

ZHAN ZHAN XI QI CULTURE CO., LTD.

JOB TITLE

Director

Contact

ZHANG XU Zhan

Email

moreszhan@gmail.com

Mobile

+886 988 825 614