Acting Out

Five young students in a Shanghai school of arts audition for a part in a film. They talk about their inspirations, their personnal story and about what drives them to act. Being adolescents, their motivations are as ingenuous and unclear as the film they are auditioning for. Combining documentary and fiction, the script writes itself around one question: if they could act anything, what would it be? The clashing of their wide-eyed desires and the serious job of acting, the clashing of their rigourous school environment and their most frivolous acting fantasies, and the clashing of two cultures, a disoriented western director meeting China for the first time amidst a bubling crowd of young artists, gives births to fortuitous scenes with an unhinged quality that ultimately, are only for them to act out. (La Distributrice de films)