A Terrible Beauty

Iram Ghufran
India | 2024 | 50 min
World premiere
Languages : English, Chinese
Subtitles : English, French

What makes a body human? This science-fiction fable shot in China foreshows the rise of AI. Time behaves fluidly as we travel into the near future in the company of an unusual pair: Blue and her friend, a mannequin named Lucy. Iram Ghufran allows herself certain liberties with the documentary format, while creating superb tableaux depicting an uncanny reality.

The "beauty" of the title may well be the beauty that seems to have gripped Iram Gufran during her simple urban observation of the vast city of Yiwu, in China. Her camera embarks on a captivating exploration of this real-life set, which she has taken over and renamed "Miracle City," turning it into a science-fiction metropolis in an imaginary near-future. Her carefully composed frames teem with colour, objects, modern architecture and a few individuals, including Blue, a young woman, and Lucy, the robot mannequin who keeps her company. One human, the other non-human: a voice-over narrator recounts their travel journal and reflects on notions of post-humanism and time. Blue and Lucy wander through a huge shopping centre as if through a world in itself, filming the production of manufactured objects and people at work. They push open the door of a factory making artificial flowers and dolls, and, most mysterious of all, the door to the laboratory where the eternal faces of robots are made.
Cloé Tralci

A Terrible Beauty, 2024
Bulbule, 2017
Benegal's New Cinema, 2014
There Is Something in the Air, 2011