European Premiere
Echoes of Soul 局部的人
MINT Animation Short Strand: My Spectrum, My Shadow, and My Self
Year of Production 2024
Production Countries/Regions China
Duration 11 mins
Genres Romance Coming-of-Age LGBTQ+
Dialogue Language(s)
Subtitle Language(s)
Director(s) Tifei Lu
Director’s Bio
Lu Tifei, director, creative planner, and promoter. Lu Tifei led the marketing and promotion efforts for various projects, including the festival hit short film "Chen Wenyuan" starring Mei Ting and Qiu Tian, the short films "Stupid Melon" (produced by Bad Monkey LLC. and Bilibili), and "Nan! Run!" (produced by Zhaixing Pavilion and Meila). These projects achieved millions of views, garnering both traffic and critical acclaim.
He served as the Director of HAN drama, accumulated hundreds of performances.
Additionally, Lu Tifei curated and led the marketing campaigns for the first nationwide theater and film exhibition, The Han Exhibition, and the youth culture curation project HAN DAY Art Day.
Synopsis
A gentle breath awakened her. Caught between alienation and intimacy, she sketched stroke by stroke an ideal world and a little black cat. She and the black cat became each other's missing fragments, perpetually weaving tales that completed their individual selves.
Festivals & Awards
2024 22nd Incheon International Short Film Festival - Best Screenwriter
2025 17th Macao International Film Festival
Scriptwriter(s)
Tifei Lu
Producer(s)
Xuya Chen
Executive Producer(s)
HAN
Key Casts
Yuanyuan Zhan, Wu Ao
Curators’ note
Anchored in the bond between a girl and a black cat, the film unfolds its narrative between comic-inspired imagery and a sense of lived reality, gradually shaping a dream that is both lonely and romantic. The short stands as a confessional letter addressed to the past, and as a tender homecoming to the self, unfolding in the space between breath and drawn images. (Yunjie Cai, edited by Xiyun Li)
Director’s Statement
This short film is a confessional letter I wrote to my past self. For years, I've been adept at filling reality's emotional voids with fantasies—contorted, entangled, afraid to approach—thus completing one-sided romances in my mind, each curtained with lingering regrets. Perhaps the other protagonist never truly existed; everything was an echo chamber where I conversed with my own shadow. This liminal dance between proximity and detachment,clumsy,phantasmal yet separate,,mirrors my relationship with self-spun illusions,and births the film's visual poetry where live-action and animation bleed into each other like watercolor. Love, kinship, friendship—humans persistently stitch themselves whole with relational threads. Now I see: those averted gazes,those whispers of yearning too timid to take shape,were me refracting light through the prism of my soul,gazing at alternate versions of myself suspended in time."It's alright—you still have you,"this is the heartbeat I wish to amplify through every frame:a manifesto for self-reclamation written in celluloid and stardust.
