Yiyi loin de son pays
2024 · 37m · France
Directed by Yiwei Yao
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two Chinese friends, Yiyi and Xiaoba, spend their last day together on Belle-Île-en-Mer before Xiaoba returns to China for good, leaving Yiyi alone on the island, far from her country and every landmark.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects melancholy when a friendship ends; Yao instead gives you two people treating a French island like it's theirs to keep, which is a much weirder, more honest thing to watch.
The film locates itself in a careful lineage of diaspora cinema and structural restraint—the final separation gains weight precisely because Yao refuses to sentimentalize the landscape or the goodbye.
The real move here is how Yao uses silence and dead time between the characters to do the emotional work; there's a lightness in the framing that makes the impending absence unbearable.