Red Star Alley
2022 · 2m
Directed by Jenny Yujia Shi
Genres: animation, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
A vine takes root in old Beijing, witnessing the passage of time in a traditional hutong, part of an urban fabric fast disappearing under radical transformation. Jenny Yujia Shi crafts an animated elegy to a vanishing way of life in backlit cut-outs.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a pretty straightforward elegy—vine witnesses time, Beijing vanishes, we feel sad about it—and I respect the restraint, but the premise doesn't snap in a way that makes me want to argue about it later.
Shi's backlit cut-outs situate themselves perfectly in a lineage of shadow-play and animated essay cinema, a formally considered meditation on architectural erasure that moves with the deliberation of someone who understands exactly what she's inheriting and refusing.
The decision to make the vine the witness—silent, rooted, unable to flee—is what transforms this from a lament into something that actually lands; it's such a small formal choice, but it reframes the entire emotional architecture of a disappearing city.
Reviews
Making ingenious use of backlit cut-outs, Jenny Yujia Shi crafts an animated elegy to a vanishing way of life.