SLO Film Fest 2021 Interviews: Writer/Director Xuan Liu talks about his film BLOOM

Xuan Liu makes his directing debut with BLOOM, a richly layered, poetic love story that takes place in late 1990s Beijing. Uniquely told through conversations between a young writer Mu Ke and his younger self, it weaves together memories, disillusions and hope, as the elder version seeks to understand things that happened in his youth, and the younger version sates his curiosity of why he seemingly has turned out the way he did.

BLOOM has a lushly gentleness to it, a melancholy to its grace notes which is not all that common to see in film today. That patience in the storytelling and you could even go so far as to say the discipline in the filmmaker’s approach allows you to connect with the young writer’s journey rather than get distracted by the conceit of him talking to his younger self. Which is to say, the film deftly eschews the gimmick for the delivery method to access his emotional process – which frankly, we can all identify with. Ultimately, just as he seeks an understanding, the film allows us to go right along with him at our own pace as well.

In the interview, Xuan Liu talks about his efforts to create a specific gentle tone in the film including the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s work, specifically WILD STRAWBERRIES on him.  He also discusses the personal nature of the story and how closely it hews to his life, how the pandemic influenced the journey of the film to audiences, and how he handled directing a child on camera.