(How to) Suffer Well: Depression Sitting Still

1. Elephants Don’t Cry

All screenings of An Elephant Sitting Still were sold out at this year’s New Directors/New Films Festival. The woman in front of me said she hoped it would be good and worth the wait. The man behind me was humming along to something that sounded like jazz. I wondered if I’d have needed to wait in standby lines twice if Hu Bo, its young Chinese director, were still alive. Hu had killed himself in the final throes of editing his film. In a document titled “The Death of a Young Director,” discovered on Hu Bo’s computer shortly after his death, Hu complained that the producers had sought to undermine him during the shoot, accused him of being unprofessional, and demanded that the film’s run time be cut in half.

is a four-hour long trial of individually engrossing seven-minute takes. The narrative is at once simple and convoluted: some nondescript city in China is suffering from an economic crisis. Schools are closing, the old are relegated to nursing homes, and no one is safe from financial blackmail or spontaneous acts of violence.