Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020, Jia Zhang-ke) (Patreon)

43/100

"Wait is this about writers?" reads a note that I made—no joke—over an hour into this not-quite-two-hour documentary. No doubt the vast majority of folks who'll see it will be aware of that going in, but lemme tell you, it's not initially or even soon apparent from the film itself, which at first appears to be concerned with a location called Jia Family Village (no connection to the director, apparently), then shifts to reminiscences of Xi'an (which Chinese viewers presumably know is likewise in Shangxi Province; I of course had no clue, and Jia certainly doesn't tell you), then seems to become a testimony about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution (as told by a writer, but I placed no significance on his profession since he talks almost exclusively about what befell his father). There's a rapid-fire montage of people speaking at what I've now learned from other reviews is the Shangxi Literary Conference, with which Jia's affiliated, but that's not contextualized onscreen in any way. Only when Yu Hua—author of To Live, from which Zhang Yimou adapted his film—speaks at length about growing up as a voracious reader and breaking into the publishing world did the light finally dawn...and even then, I failed to grasp that these particular writers are from the region earlier discussed, and that they chronicle its people in their fiction. Don't think advance knowledge would have helped much, though—odds are I'd still have been kinda bored by the elderly man's laborious account of his youthful efforts to reduce the alkalinity of his village's soil, and would still have enjoyed Yu (the best raconteur by far) recalling how his creative process was sparked by having to invent endings for books that had lost their opening and closing pages by the time they finally reached him. (Also laughed aloud at "I mainly wanted to see who'd rejected [my story], so that I could aim a bit lower next time.") A few striking images, but mostly just heads talking about tangentially related subjects; I've tried to calibrate for my ignorance and concomitant frustration (it's not Jia's responsibility to pander to Western fest audiences, after all), otherwise the rating would be significantly lower.