Next Stop Paradise
2015 · 12m · España
Directed by Jiajie Yu Yan
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Two young people live immersed in their own empty worlds, he sleeping and smoking on his sofa, she travelling by train and always visiting the same house, until one of them decides to change the situation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a Hallmark setup—two lonely people, orbit-destined to collide—but Yu Yan seems almost bored by the outcome, letting the film breathe in the spaces between gesture and event. It's quietly subversive in how little it *performs* drama.
There's a deliberate formal architecture here, two parallel voids mapped in duration and repetition, that recalls the structural meditations of Chantal Akerman or James Benning—a film aware it's working in a lineage of patient, image-based storytelling.
The choice to hold on the sofa and the train compartment as fixed frames, letting only the inhabitants' interior states shift, transforms what could be sentimental into something austere and true—one compositional decision that reframes the entire emotional register.