The competition yesterday made a leap in 1999. Both films that were presented in fact played in their plot on a couple of temporal planes, one of which (for both) is 1999. Year that proves to be decisive both for its value symbolic (the last of the previous millennium) yes for the actual one. It is a fundamental junction for China which is becoming the modern one in the grotesque and violent premise of Black Coal, Thin Ice and it is a significant year of closure for Aloft, which builds its entire framework of the relationship between normal and extraordinary, between real and symbolic. .
However, yesterday's temporal game was nothing more than a warm-up, in fact today is the day of time, thanks to the presentation in competition of Boyhood. Richard Linklater's film is a sensational narrative experiment, unprecedented, carried out by bringing together, from 2002 to today, the same cast at regular intervals of one year to shoot new scenes of a film that narrates evolution and childhood (for the 'precisely boyhood) of a human being, also visually marking his growth.
On the other hand, the other novelty of today, the visually curated No Man's Land, in which in rural China a lawyer juggles between danger and the grotesque, is of opposite sign. Atmospheres not different after all from the Bollywood road movie presented in Panorama: Highway.
