A Terrible Beauty

"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 - Visions du Réel)

"Was macht einen Körper menschlich? Diese in China gedrehte Science-Fiction-Fabel nimmt die Entwicklung der KI vorweg. In einem fliessenden Zeitverlauf werden wir in eine nahe Zukunft katapultiert, wo wir ein ungewöhnliches Duo treffen: Blue und seine Reisebegleiterin, eine Schaufensterpuppe namens Lucy. Iram Ghufran lotet die Freiheiten des Dokumentarfilms aus und komponiert gleichzeitig wunderschöne, realitätshungrige Bilder."
(Visions du Réel)