Hu Bo’s ‘An Elephant Sitting Still’ wins International Federation of Film Critics Prize

Four people seek an escape from the malaise of life in a hardscrabble industrial town through the myth of a lazy elephant

An Elephant Sitting Still — the debut feature written and directed by late Chinese filmmaker Hu Bo, who took his own life last October at age 29 — has been awarded the International Federation of Film Critics prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The narrative interweaves the lives of four characters for whom the only salvation from the malaise of life in a hardscrabble northern Chinese industrial town is the myth of a faraway elephant, who, like Melville’s Bartleby, prefers not to eat, move, or do much of anything.

Bound together by ennui, the cast — a racketeer sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend, a teenage girl disgraced for dating the vice-principal of her school, a teenage boy who pushes the school bully down a flight of stairs, and a pensioner resisting his family’s efforts to move him into a retirement home — envisions an escape from the mores with which they all struggle.

Reviewing the film for CineVue, Patrick Gamble writes, “There’s a hallucinatory aura that surrounds Hu’s film, thanks primarily to the lyricism of his camera. Floating constantly between his characters like smoke trapped in a glass, the lens clings mercilessly to their haunted faces, with almost every second of the film’s intimidating 230-minute runtime filmed in close-up.”

“Hu’s chosen aesthetic and mode of storytelling are entirely his own,” Giovanni Marchini Camia writes for BFI. “Staying close to the protagonists at all times, both literally and figuratively, the film patiently draws a profoundly empathetic portrait of human suffering that is at once epic and intimate … The exceptional delicacy with which Hu delineates his characters’ trajectories transcends their wretchedness.”

“The film attained instant cult status among critics at the Berlinale,” according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Clarence Tsui.