Presented in conjunction with Tales of Our Time, this film program features documentary and narrative works that explore topics shared with the exhibition, investigating concepts such as boundaries, territory, migration, and place.
Poet on a Business Trip (2014) was filmed 14 years ago. In September 2002 the Beijing-based underground filmmaker Ju Anqi brought a poet called Shu on the train from Beijing to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region about 4,000 kilometers away. They planned to make a completely different kind of road movie or Western in this desolate westernmost region. In primitive and impoverished conditions, the two began a 40-day journey, crossing the whole of Xinjiang. The film was finally finished in 2014. This low-budget, black-and-white film in fact does not pay tribute to the road movie or the Western but instead presents a kind of ineffable, absurd satire. Its metaphorical title and bare-bones style bring out a desolate and allegorical radiance in the nihilism that underpins its absurdity. For more information, please visit the Guggenheim