Stranger

North American Premiere

Grand Prize, Proxima Competition, 2024 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Hotel rooms are waystations dressed up like homes, and global intersection points where everyone is isolated in cramped fishbowls. In STRANGER, the latest feature by Chicago-based filmmakers Zhengfan Yang and Shengze Zhu (Present.Perfect, SDAFF ’19), those contradictions and more are on display in seven fictional vignettes, each shot in mesmerizing single long takes. In one, a housekeeper makes her mark by leaving no trace. In another, two men are awakened by a hostile visitor. In one of the film’s showstoppers, a couple discusses the wife’s forthcoming interrogation by an immigration officer. These are ordinary moments, multiplied, with the scalpel-like precision of Yang’s camera.

As the stories build upon each other, they chart a centrifugal path away from China to the overseas, with escalating dissociation culminating in characters who barely recognize themselves onscreen or in a mirror. Hotels are portals and metaphors, architectural curiosities but also deadeningly mundane carbon copy boxes. As filmmakers working between countries and at the edges of film industries and the art world, Yang and Zhu see in hotel rooms both familiarity and absurdity, and with STRANGER, they box those feelings of transience, wandering from room to room, story to story, strangers at home in nowhere spaces.

– Brian Hu