Writer & Director: Xiaolu Guo

Cast: Udo Kier, Shi Ke

Region: Germany

Year of Production: 2011

Running Time: 110min

Based on the novel UFO in Her Eyes, by Xiaolu Guo

This film is a tribute to Soy Cuba by Mikhail Kalatozov

Synopsis:

One very hot afternoon, the life of an anonymous Chinese village woman abruptly changes when she sees a UFO flying across the sky. The village chief takes advantage of this unexpected event to boost the poverty-stricken local economy – stimulating tourism, getting government support, and even making contact with the USA. This carefully observed film, inspired by both Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Kurosawa’s Rashomon, portrays the lives of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary social circumstances in contemporary China.

Filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo was born in China in 1973, and studied at the Beijing Film Academy. Author of seven novels and a book of poetry, and director several documentaries and two feature films, Guo was named one of Granta’s Best Young Writers in 2013. Her novels include Twenty Fragments Of A Ravenous Youth (2008), and Lovers in the Age of Indifference (2010), and her most popular novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers (2007, Random House) has been translated into 23 languages. Guo’s first feature film, She, A Chinese (2009) was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2009. Guo’s most recent film, based on her novel of the same name, UFO in Her Eyes, is a surreal political metaphor about how a rural Chinese village is radically transformed due to an alleged UFO sighting. This parable of change paints a restless future, not only for rural China, but for the entire world.