All Tomorrow’s Parties

Set in a post-apocalyptic future where the totalitarian
religious-political sect Gui Dao governs Asia, All Tomorrow’s
Parties is a vision of things to come as bleak as it is vague.
Two brothers, Zhuai and Mian are sent to the Camp Prosper-
ity to be re-educated and to get rid of all their dissident
ideas. Camp life, however, is not only propaganda and strict
rules to be obeyed. Zhuai meets the pretty Xuelan and when
the sect is suddenly overthrown, he settles with her and her
small boy in a nearly abandoned city.
All Tomorrow’s Parties is photographer-director Yu Lik-
Wai’s second feature ﬁ lm (his ﬁ rst, Love Will Tear Us Apart,was screen at the festival in 1999) and, although it takes
place in a world of its own, it bears semblance to present
day events and movements like the Taliban government in
Afghanistan, the Falun Gong in China or the Aum in Japan.
Still, its deliberately detached and slow moving aesthetics
and truly stunning DV-photography makes it more of kin
to the ﬁ lms of Andrei Tarkovsky in general, and Stalker in
particular, rather than your average political allegory.
KJELL CYPERN