Lagoon

澙湖

QIU Runfeng

11 minutes | 2025 | Animation | No Dialogue | No Subtitles
World Premiere

Content Advisory: This film contains scenes of lighting that may affect photosensitive viewers

7:15 PM, SAT, AUG 9
Innis Town Hall

Screening + Live Zoom Q&A

A virus looms, the dead sun sinking, with endless tides, and no one is whole.

QIU Runfeng’s animated short Lagoon captures the collective emotions during the pandemic lockdowns through a fable-like visual language. The lagoon—a semi-isolated zone between land and sea—becomes a symbol for the confusion and helplessness of that time. What stands out most is the film’s use of colour: the burning orange-red palette evokes Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s The Scream, intensifying a sense of oppression; while the deep, layered blues recall the melancholic weight found in Chinese Canadian painter Matthew Wong’s blue-toned works. With thorn-like branches spreading across the screen and ghost towns emptied of life, Qiu drifts between reality and the surreal, using images to tap into a collective subconscious shaped by isolation. The result is an unsettling, unspoken pain that lingers. It is a pain shared by all: even if you resist revisiting it, life finds its own way to make you remember.

– SHEN Wei

Director

QIU Runfeng is an animator and filmmaker. Often inspired by the psychological effects of information overflow and semantic satiation, his work explores the displacement of history, imagination, and perception.

Credits

  • Director: QIU Runfeng
  • Producer: QIU Runfeng
  • Editor: QIU Runfeng
  • Music: TRT, Neo GAO Jiapu, Jack English
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