Present.Perfect.
(Wan Mei Xian Zai Shi)

What is it about ? The tense of a verb ? A determination thwarted by a dot still separating the two words ? The third documentary in five years from the Chinese filmmaker Zhu Shengze is first and foremost that of a spectator. Over a long period of time, she watched live Internet streaming, these images with no future, made by a multitude of anonymous Chinese who show moments of their life on the Web and invent real-time scenes of their personal diaries for anyone who wants to watch. Somewhere between Freaks and a showroom setting, four « anchors» thus become the characters- actors of an unusual and primitive film on early 21st century China. It is also a way of saying that these snapshots of lives lived still escape the official control of cyberspace (for how long ?)… they are lives in the present.perfect. Jérôme Baron