Photo: Conrad Clark's Soul Carriage
For his debut feature Soul Carriage, U.K.-born director Conrad Clark not only sets his story in China, but assumes some of the stylistic and narrative hallmarks that have come to dominate that country's contemporary cinema: unhurried camerawork, the use of nonprofessional actors, a focus on a solitary male protagonist, and a fascination with the dynamic between the modern and traditional. Clark, however, doesn't mean to flatter through imitation but, rather, to capture the dialectic between man and his environment as well as China's urban futurism and rural stasis, all via the story of a lowly Shanghai construction worker named Xinren (Yang Feng Jun) who—after failing to secure money for birthday beers from his boss—is instead tasked with transporting the body of a dead worker to the man's family. Nick Schager
For his debut feature Soul Carriage, U.K.-born director Conrad Clark not only sets his story in China, but assumes some of the stylistic and narrative hallmarks that have come to dominate that country's contemporary cinema: unhurried camerawork, the use of nonprofessional actors, a focus on a solitary male protagonist, and a fascination with the dynamic between the modern and traditional. Clark, however, doesn't mean to flatter through imitation but, rather, to capture the dialectic between man and his environment as well as China's urban futurism and rural stasis, all via the story of a lowly Shanghai construction worker named Xinren (Yang Feng Jun) who—after failing to secure money for birthday beers from his boss—is instead tasked with transporting the body of a dead worker to the man's family. Nick Schager
