Sijia Ke's Pear (2015)
Sijia Ke's film Pear is based on a true story. Maybe. It's based on a story, in any case — one that Ke was listening to on the radio, despite not speaking the language it was broadcast in.
NOTE: This Monday short was originally posted on September 10, 2018. We are re-uploading Peter Hemminger's original Monday Shorts until further notice.
Sijia Ke's film Pear is based on a true story. Maybe. It's based on a story, in any case — one that Ke was listening to on the radio, despite not speaking the language it was broadcast in. But something in the tone and the overall atmosphere moved her anyway, and she translated it into an elliptical, abstracted version of her own.
Drawn very simply, using pencil and paper, the film feels improvised, like Ke had to capture it on paper before the mood escaped. It's not that it's rushed—the pacing is too methodical for that. But it is intentionally rough, and consistently unsettling, a dream that threatens to turn into a nightmare even though it isn't explicitly nightmarish. What it is more than anything is a mood, and I guess if it could be captured in words, Ke wouldn't have needed to draw it.
Film Credits:
Animation: Sijia Ke
Writer: Sijia Ke
Composer/Sound Design: Sami El- Enany
Actors/Voiceovers: Sijia Ke
Animation assistants: Yao Xiang, Miaojian Dong, Shijie Hai
syn. I came up with the whole story by listening to a foreign radio fm in which a narrator told a story about in a language I didn't understand. Whilst listening to the piece bit by bit, I was able to feel the atmosphere, I somehow understood what it was about and wanted to translate it to myself.
The whole script was created directly whilst listening to the radio. I can't go back to find out what the radio story truly was about, but to me, the story I have created and the radio piece symbolize the same mood.
It has been a very personal experience in which I have captured this moment in time and to give that experience an ending.
This is my graduation film in the Royal College of Art, 2015
2015