Variety is exclusively unveiling a new clip from “Light Pillar,” the feature debut from Chinese writer-director Xu Zao, which is in the Berlin Film Festival‘s Perspectives section.
Dubai-based company Cercamon recently acquired worldwide sales rights to the production, which screens in competition for the best first feature award in the strand.
“Light Pillar” follows a solitary janitor working in a deteriorating film studio who becomes absorbed in a virtual romance before his illusion collapses. When a production crew arrives to film an alien invasion movie on the crumbling backlot, the janitor decides to vanish alongside the studio itself.
The genre-crossing romantic sci-fi drama with touches of comedy uses hand-drawn animation to portray the protagonist’s mundane reality while live-action sequences depict the virtual realm to where he escapes.
“‘Light Pillar’ combines romance, science fiction, and comedy,” Xu said in a statement. “though the story takes place in the future, its themes come from our lives today. In life, love and happiness are sometimes things we chase, but often they are already around us – we just don’t notice them because we’re distracted by everything else.”
The director explained his unconventional visual strategy: “Visually, the film mixes animation and live action to show two different worlds. Unlike the usual approach, animation here represents our protagonist’s real life, while live-action footage shows the virtual world. For him, reality feels flat, while the virtual world looks vivid, rich, and full of new possibilities.”
Da Peng stars as the janitor and serves as executive producer on the film, which Lu Xiaowei produces.
Xu holds a master’s degree from the Beijing Film Academy’s School of Fine Art. His 43-minute animated work “No Changes Have Taken In Our Life” premiered at Rotterdam in 2023 and collected the Golden Dove for animated film at DOK Leipzig plus the Grand Prize at Japan’s Image Forum Festival. Beyond directing, Xu also wrote the screenplay and created the storyboards for “Light Pillar.”
Watch the clip here:
Source: variety.com
