Jennique Mason weighs in on Du Haibin’s Umbrella, also featured in Jeffrey M. Anderson’s ‘SFIFF, day ten’ diary:
Director Du Haibin reveals the gap between labor and commodity in his modern-day documentary odyssey Umbrella. Beginning with the actual construction of mass-produced umbrellas in an urban factory, Du traces the product’s journey as it becomes increasingly divorced from its origins. He juxtaposes the tedium and repetition of factory work with the mindless chatter of umbrella merchants’ wives who shamelessly lust after Audis and BMWs.
Can you stand under an umbrella?
Umbrella complicates these relationships with one beautiful shot after another. As factory workers, students and soldiers all attempt to shed their agricultural heritage, they find there are no guarantees in a consumer-based society. In creating a vast societal portrait through his focus on umbrellas, Du pulls off the rare feat of capturing the ephemeral. Umbrella takes modern life to its logical conclusion, succinctly stated by an auctioneer-type host at a job fair cattle call: “You go to school, so you can get a job, so you can make money, so you can buy a home, so you can start a family and send your children to school.”
Umbrella screens Thurs/8, 8:30 p.m. at the Kabuki