The Paper (纸) (2000)
Directed by Ding Jiancheng
62 minutes
Adapted from a short story by Su Tong, one of China's foremost contemporary novelists whose fiction inspired _Raise the Red Lantern_, Ding Jiancheng's _The Paper_ is one of the most visually distinctive Chinese films of its era. Centered on an elderly maker of paper effigies and the young boy drawn into his world, the film treats paper as both subject and method, drifting between literature and cinema, dream and reality, color and monochrome. The result is a film in a constant state of transformation, rooted in craft, materiality, and storytelling. Long believed to survive only in a single 35mm release print, the film was digitized by the Asian Film Archive in 2021, making this remarkable debut feature newly accessible to audiences. _—Sam C. Mac_