River Yuhao Cao
曹宇豪
The Glass Essays
River is My Hometown
I Found a Dead Bird (Performance)
I Found a Dead Bird (Moving Image)
Forest Picture
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The Glass Essays
The Glass Essays
玻璃随笔
4K, Color, 16 mins, Sound, 2025, China / UK
Unable to sleep, a young man is lured into the woods by a mysterious sound. He follows it across a river, through forests and shadows, until he finally comes upon the red curtains of a travelling funeral performance stage. The mesmerising mourning recital that unfolds is a dreamlike invitation into a sensorial exploration of memories, rituals, and ghosts. – Visiond du Réel 2025
“Between waking and dreaming, how free can the boundaries of the human psyche become?” / Glass Essays employs a purely audiovisual language to explore this question./ Is it a remembrance of the departed? A projection of desire toward another? Or an unbearable erotic dream? Through the magical threshold between night and day, the film uses a seemingly realistic male journey to symbolize time and space, opening up rich possibilities for interpretation./ When fireworks burst in the distance and the scene suddenly returns to the quiet of early morning, I would say that the most beautiful, most essential vitality in a person is, in fact, the state of being in flux.” - Shen Ko-Shang
Taking inspiration from Anne Carson’s skeletal image, The Glass Essays experiments with the ritual of mourning as a psychoanalytic method in filmmaking, and a mode of exploring fluid identities and queerness, especially Cao’s personal experience of growing up queer in a small Southern Chinese town.
The film arose from artist’s own memories of his grandparents working in funeral processions in his hometown in Nanxian, Hunan where they would travel and perform with a mobile truck-stage across the region. The Glass Essays re-examines the performative role of lamentation in regional Chinese cultures through a queer lens, a process of fluidity and ritualisation as a way to confront the past and its ghosts.
The Glass Essays (2025), River Yuhao Cao, Film Still
The Glass Essays (2025), River Yuhao Cao, Film Still
The Glass Essays (2025), River Yuhao Cao, Film Still
The Glass Essays (2025), River Yuhao Cao, Set Photo courtesy of Wei Jinchun
Showcase of The Glass Essays:
2025 Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland. (World Premiere)
2025 Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver, Canada.
2025 Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel, Germany.
2025 Aesthetica Film Festival, York, UK.
2025 Beijing International Short Film Festival, Beijing, China. *Awarded: JURY SPECIAL MENTION - Sinophone Competition
2025 Cinetoro Experimental Film Festival, Toro, Colombia. *Awarded: HONORABLE MENTION - International Competition
2025 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia
2026 New Contemporaries: South London Gallery (SLG) & Middlesbrough Museum of Modern Art (MIMA). UK (upcoming)
2026 LUX, London, UK (upcoming)
The Glass Essays is supported by Arts Council England - National Lottery Project Grant, and the FLAMIN (Film London Artists’ Moving Image) Fellowship. Additional support from Forma Arts and Media.