San Diego Asian Film Festival 2025
In a world where people have stopped dreaming in order to expand their lifespans, a few brave folk still dream, warping the fabric of time. The film gives us five dreams, one for each of the senses, each representing a chronological period of Chinese film and cinema.
Only at the best festival to attend all year, the San Diego Asian Film Festival, can you watch a film that’s surreal, moving, confusing and chaotic and gorgeous, all wrapped up as a love letter to the history of Chinese films. Leave a seat for your own personal deleriant, and let’s get into this!
The wraparound story that ties all the vignettes together is this weird seemingly-ancient presentation of sepia tones and cue cards, from back when ditty movies had piano music and no voices, the German Expressionist cinema monster era of the 1920’s. Average people no longer dream, but some are either forced to or still do by choice, and are known as ‘deleriants’ for such dangerous actions. Shu Qi plays the silent woman who wakes the Fantasmer, the deleriant who takes us on an epic journey as the last bits of his life-force ebb away.
First, the film deleriant resurfaces in the mid-20th century, during World War II, a man accused of committing murder already. The Commander (Mark Chao) is hunting a mysterious suitcase that has the potential to end the on-going war entirely, and he’s also chasing our deleriant, known in this vignette as Qiu.
Some thirty-odd years later, the deleriant is now Mongrel, a petty thief stranded in a ruined Buddhist temple. Beset by a toothache, Mongrel makes all the wrong choices and manages to set the trickster Spirit of Bitterness free, who of course promptly takes the form of Mongrel’s father, whom he had had to mercy kill in order to save him from a horrid death by rabies, and now feels terribly guilty for. The on-going storm and the setting of the crumbling Buddhist temple are perfect for all the films reminiscent of the Bruce Lee cinematic era, a staple of emerging Chinese martial arts films.
Moving right along in years, the deleriant is now Jia, a con artist working his way among the gangsters of his neighborhood, who finds and recruits a young girl as his sidekick. The young girl has a sad backstory having to do with an absent father and a riddle she believes will bring him back, but Jia is a snappy, readily-available replacement. And the two of them are about to attempt to swindle the big mob boss in their neighborhood with a great big ol’ con that, if discovered, will get them both executed. This one is a wonderfully shot tribute to the Chinese Triad and gangster films, hugely popular even today.
And then finally, we are spending New Years eve of 1999 with the deleriant as a young hoodlum called Apollo, enamored of a fellow delinquent called Tai Zhaomei. While Apollo might be willingly violent in his capacity as a thug, it turns out Tai has him beat as far as horrors go. The vignette is filmed as a brilliant homage to the Chinese fascination with vampires, and the continual long-shots of fighting amongst the hoods overlit by crimson light is quite recognizable in the Asian horror world.
The final dream turns out to be the last one for our deleriant as well, and Shu performs funerary rites for him. In fact, it kind of seems to be a funeral she holds for all of us, the deleriants of her world, and the audience watching her in awe too. One hopes the mystery and fascination of movies in the theater, given to us here as a gift of love for all forms of filmmaking over more than a century of existence, will never die, or be forgotten.