With Dragonfly Eyes Chinese artist Xu Bing experiments with the feature-length cinematic format by constructing an entire fictional narrative from actual footage recorded by the plethora of cameras which have come to surround our daily lives: security and traffic cameras, webcams et al. Utilising the cold mechanical indifference, the incongruous “non-human” angles and the implicit narrational capacities of such cameras, the film pieces together a fictional life-story made cohesive by the voices and voiceovers of professional actors. Protagonists are Qing Ting and Ke Fan, the former being a young woman who after leaving her path to nunhood at a Buddhist monastery embarks on a string of low-level jobs in the secular world; the latter being a male technician who, upon meeting Qing Ting, starts to develop an (unreturned) attraction and, soon enough, an obsession for her. The resulting narrative ebbs and flows from one piece of footage to the next, sometimes returning to previous passages and sometimes progressing through the accumulation of tragic, violent and shocking clips. Voyeurism and control, fake and real, private and public, offline and online, human interactions and pervasive violence: this is a work which boldly addresses some of the most pressing dilemmas of today’s societies. (Davide CAZZARO)