Poet On A Business Trip
Filmfest 2015

This movie was filmed twelve years ago. In September of 2002, the Beijing-based underground filmmaker Ju Anqi brought a poet called Shu on the train from Beijing to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region 4000 kilometers away. In this desolate westernmost region, they planned to make a completely different kind of road movie or Western. Ju Anqi would be screenwriter, director, and cinematographer, and Shu would play the role of the poet, filming with a DV camera. In primitive and impoverished conditions, the two began a forty-day journey, crossing the whole of Xinjiang. After twelve years of silence, the film was finally finished in 2014. This low-budget black and white film in fact doesn't pay tribute to the road movie or the Western, but instead presents a kind of ineffable absurdity and satire. Its metaphorical title and barebones style bring out a desolate and allegorical radiance in the nihilism that underpins its absurdity. The poet on a business trip wrote sixteen poems, and this film begins with the first one.