FACES & PLACES

Chris Darke on the Rotterdam Film Festival 2008

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More focused was We Went to Wonderland, the latest documentary by prolific London based Chinese novelist and filmmaker Guo Xiaolu. Shot in black and white on a camera-phone, the film is an affectionate portrait of the filmmaker’s parents on their first trip to Europe, and the couple certainly make for engaging subjects. The mother is hardy and rotund; the father, a painter who was interned in a labor camp for 10 years during the Cultural Revolution, is as spare as a pair of chopsticks. Mute from throat cancer, he communicates with his daughter via scribbled notes, and his pithy observations are often spot-on. An extended sequence showing the pair cooling their heels on a London railway platform yields an assessment no Londoner would dispute: “English trains don’t respect the people’s time.” I used to live in the part of London where most of the film was shot, the deprived but vibrant East End borough of Hackney, and Guo’s fish-out-of-water folks enrich Wonderland’s immigrant perspective on its neighborhoods.

published in Film Comment 64-65, New York

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