The Stork That Ascended the Heavens Into Existence
Genre:
Tragicomedy/ Feature film / Post-modern / meditative / docu-fiction
Runtime:
130min.
TAGLINE:
The stork has no idea it is the protagonist.
The stork has no idea it is the protagonist.
LOGLINE:
Ren knows exactly who the protagonist is, but increasingly has no idea what the story is. A Taiwanese filmcrew desperate to complete nature documentary follows a young stork on its first migration from Eastern Europe to Africa, but as storms, wars, borders and reallity in general feruse to cooperate, their attempt to tell the stork's story turns into a struggle to understand how humans construct stories about the world.
Ren knows exactly who the protagonist is, but increasingly has no idea what the story is. A Taiwanese filmcrew desperate to complete nature documentary follows a young stork on its first migration from Eastern Europe to Africa, but as storms, wars, borders and reallity in general feruse to cooperate, their attempt to tell the stork's story turns into a struggle to understand how humans construct stories about the world.
Synopsis:
A post-modern meta-film about storytelling itself, it follows a Taiwanese film crew trying to make a nature documentary about a young stork on its first migration from Eastern Europe to Africa. Ren, the director, has a love-hate relationship with his profession, but this film is a big gamble for his career, and he will do almost anything to finish it.
Unfortunately, nature, humans and reality in general refuse to cooperate. As the crew follows the stork for more than thirty days across borders, storms, sandstorms, vast deserts and wars, 13the challenges of filming become endless. They spend weeks following an animal that does not know what a documentary is, does not understand borders and, most importantly, refuses to perform. The stork disappears, people interfere, and reality keeps producing things that are impossible to explain in a voice-over and do not fit the story they are trying to tell.
And people, like the stork, have their instincts, territories and ideas about where they belong. The difference is that people also have abstract concepts, identities, cameras, borders and opinions about what is really happening. While Ren struggles to make sense of the material and somehow finish his film, the journey becomes a tragicomic encounter with the way humans perceive the world, turn information into stories, and then start believing the stories they have made.
