After All

事过方觉

LIU Chongyan

25 minutes | 2024 | Fiction | English, German | English and Chinese Subtitles
North American Premiere

Content Advisory:  This film contains scenes of themes of suicide.

8:00 PM, MON, AUG 11
Innis Town Hall

Screening + Live Zoom Q&A

Based on the director’s personal experience, this film follows a university student in Berlin who, after discovering a classmate’s suicide on campus, begins attending counselling sessions.

Director LIU Chongyan’s After All is set at a university in Berlin and follows a young woman who begins attending regular counselling sessions after discovering that a transgender classmate took their own life. From a detached and restrained observational viewpoint, Liu reconstructs an incident she experienced herself. This is not her first time drawing on something personal—her earlier short Is there a Pine on the Mountain, which we screened previously, does the same.

In this film, through the bleak, stagnant campus and the wind-trembled reflections on the window, a fragile emotional space is created—one that is on the brink of collapse without ever fully tipping over. The film’s power lies in its composed, restrained, and anti-dramatic narrative, provoking a tension that holds the viewer in quiet unease. This is not a cathartic outpouring of grief, but the lingering echo of trauma—one that resists easy resolution and demands time to absorb.

In a final, unexpected gesture, Liu breaks the fiction at the film’s end, taking the viewer to rise above the sealed frame of trauma—as if only by doing so can the living find a way to go on.

– SHEN Wei

Director

Headshot of LIU Chongyan

LIU Chongyan (b. 1995 in Guizhou, China) is a visual artist and filmmaker working between France and China. She began her formal training in painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (2013-2017), after which she continued her studies at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, obtaining a Diplôme National Supérieur d’Arts Plastiques in 2022 under the mentorship of Atelier Cogitore and Atelier Halilaj-Urbano. In 2024, she completed a residency at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, where she expanded her practice in visual arts with a focus on multimedia and audiovisual experimentation. MulanIFF screend her short film Is there a Pine on the Mountain in 2023.

Credits

  • Director: LIU Chongyan
  • Principal Cast: DAI Chuning, Antonia SANDROCK
  • Producer: Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
  • Screenplay: LIU Chongyan, Thomas MOORE
  • Cinematographer: LIU Yadi
  • Editor: LIU Chongyan Liu, Jérôme ERHART
  • Sound: Nicolas VERHAEGHE
  • Music: LI Guowen
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