cinema Fontevraud-l'Abbaye

Cassie Shao/

Director & animator

Cassie Shao is a Chinese director and animator.

Residency project:

A Becoming (work-in-progress title) is an animated short film of around 8 minutes.

A mixed-media approach combining digitally drawn characters with painted background/abstract texture and 3D objects.

“The film depicts a surreal and dream-like journey in which the character’s reality is described, interpreted and overthrown as her will of it changes. It does so repeatedly until the character realises that while she is on this journey trying to reach various forms of ideals (an ideal life that is taught to her, the ideal others created), she is fleeing herself. She will then retrieve herself when she (literally) steps into herself at the end. It emphasises a state in which it feels like floating in mid-air and full of momentary discontinuities that seemly have their own consciousness, she does not know what she is to become, but she is becoming.”