Huahua’s Dazzling World and its Myriad Temptations 花花世界 (2022)
Huahua, an eccentric and exuberant woman from Xiongan New Area, livestreams herself dancing, singing, and chatting with fans on Kuaishou for a living. Cell phone screens, beauty filters, and digital soundscapes reveal a world that Huahua creates with her own image.
82 min, 2K DCP
Screenings:
2024 - Screendance (Salt Lake City, UT)
2023 - Museum of Moving Image, First Look (New York); Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, MI); Athens International Film + Video Festival (Athens, OH); Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec (Montréal); Mulan International Film Festival (Toronto); To Surge is To Spray Forth To The Sky #2: Cellular Imaginings, PW Magazine
2022 - Cinéma du Réel, International Selection (Paris); Diffusion Festival (Toronto); Mimesis Documentary Festival (Boulder, CO) — Jury Award for Best Documentary; Festival International du Film Indépendant de Bordeaux
VOD: Available on Tënk in select countries
On collection at Images en Biblioteques (Paris, France), Chinese Independent Film Archives (Newcastle, UK)
Where is the film? In China, of course. But its triumph is that it renders its grating comicality and her digital loneliness very familiar to us. This energy of despair in the social network, it is our neighbour, it is us, it is those we know. And the surrealist poetry of the film is all the stronger as it suddenly emerges in brutality. Poignant!
— Matthieu Chatellier, Cinéma du Réel 2022 juror
In the past decade, humans have developed completely new lives on the internet, a strange and sometimes terrifying facet of reality that cinema has struggled to evoke. Huahua’s Dazzling World and Its Myriad Temptations by Daphne Xu rises to the challenge. As it peers through the illusory filters of livestreaming apps and incisively processes its own embodied camera, this precise and peculiar film births an invigorating new language to befit the spirit of its charismatic star.
— Lynne Sachs, Sanaz Sohrabi, and Chris Boeckmann, 2022 Mimesis Documentary Festival jurors
Of course I love Huahua herself, who has masterfully woven performance into sincerity and thus declines the traditional distinction that defines “authenticity.” She’s brash and gives not a rat’s ass what you think of her as she declares her hottest takes on everything from mortality to spousal ethics. “We like you, that’s why we watch you,” fawns one of her many Kuaishou admirers. Her charisma is equal parts bulldozer and thunderbolt.
— Fan Wu, commissioned essay for Diffusion Festival 2022
In this radical gesture of mise en abyme of modified images, Daphne Xu’s film paradoxically accomplishes what André Bazin said of cinema: an embalming, or a death mask of reality. By staging these images shot by a woman in the perpetual staging of herself, this doubling of the cinematographic gesture comes to accredit the death of life, that which takes place precisely outside of social networks. Daphne Xu’s film therefore smells of real life, the one that disappears when you spend it filming yourself.
— Tristan Duval-Cos, Zone Critique
Press and other writing by Cinéma du Réel (Interview), Gaspard Labastie, Corentin Brunie, Tristan Duval-Cos, Matthieu Chatellier, Fabien Velasquez (Jury Notes), Matt Turner, Fan Wu, Conor Williams.
Poster by Diane Zhou