Cedric Cheung-Lau
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“Understanding This Feeling, How this Strange and Foreign Land Meant So Much to Me”: Cedric Cheung-Lau on The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me
Screening tomorrow night at New York’s BAM Rose Cinema is one of the real and under-screened discoveries of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me, the transfixing debut feature from Cedric Cheung-Lau, who has worked for a decade in the New York independent film scene gaffing such features as Patti Cake$, Christine and Monsters and Men. Embracing slow cinema and tacking away from the dialogue-driven penchant of much U.S. independent film, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me is as much about landscape as story, about the possible meanings delivered through the pauses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 4, 2022 -
Sundance 2020 Dispatch 5: Shirley, The Mountains are a Dream That Calls to Me, małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore
In one of those freak festival viewing coincidences that don’t really mean anything, Sunday started with two movies in a row opening with the sound of a reiki bowl. The higher profile one, Shirley, marks multiple firsts for Josephine Decker: first directed from someone else’s screenplay (by Sarah Gubbins, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel), first period piece and—most crucially to my mind—first without DP Ashley Connor. The subject is Shirley Jackson; I’ve read two of her short stories (I’m not proud of that) and would be curious to hear how this plays for knowledgeable admirers. Adaptation or no, visually this is […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 29, 2020 -
“The Walking Stick Is the Object That Ties Their Fates Together”: Cedric Cheung-Lau | The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me
Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? In a film shot in so many wide landscapes, where our characters are sometimes just dots in the space, I think it’s a culmination of tiny details, some which may not even be seen, that gives the film its character and emotion. More overtly and specifically however, the walking stick Tukten […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2020 -
Lookbook Case Study: The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me
Writer/director Cedric Cheung-Lau says the initial version of the script for his in-development debut feature, The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me, consisted solely of 44 images. Then came the words. For the lookbook, Cheung-Lau took sentences from the finished script and married them to images of his location, the Annapurna section of the Himalayas. The script tells the story of a grieving older woman and a young Nepalese man who meet in the mountains and go on a journey together, and Cheung-Lau stresses the importance of the setting to the story. “The landscape surrounding them is real,” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2019
