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China, Hong Kong, United States · 2017
2h 4m
Director Zhu Shengze
Starring
Genre Documentary
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PRESENT.PERFECT. weaves together a diverse range of moments and occurrences filmed and broadcasted by a dozen of little-known Chinese live-streaming anchors from various parts of China, including a street dancer, a tower crane operator, a man with Idiopathic Short Stature, a girl with Muscular Dystrophy, a poor farmer, a young single mother, a middle-aged crossdresser, and among others.
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Composed entirely of found footage and presented in black and white to lend visual consistency, the film raises important questions about the politics of viewership, the documentary form’s complex ties to reality and about human relationships in a digitally connected world.
The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi
Zhu Shengze’s poignant Present.Perfect. follows a dozen anchors over a period of ten months. It distills some 800 hours of live footage into a 124-minute documentary–a black-and-white collage stirring questions that far transcend the country and the zeitgeist it captures.
The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young
Punctuated with moments of illumination, humor and even occasional visual flair —the opening shot executes a stately 360-degree cityscape pan from a high crane — Present. Perfect manages to retain interest despite a certain repetitiveness and some patience-taxing longueurs.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
This is a film in touch with modernity, but I wonder if the livestreamers were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear. And I was unsure about Zhu’s decision to correct all the images from colour to black-and-white, an arthouse-ification that the film didn’t need.
What the film depicts is at times creepy and unsettling, but it lifts the lid on an aspect of the virtual world which may be unfamiliar to audiences in the west.