The Glass Essays
The Glass Essays
4K, Color, 16 mins, Sound, China / UK
Unable to sleep, a young man is lured into the woods by a mysterious sound. He follows it across a river, through forest 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
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 is supported by Arts Council England, and the FLAMIN (Film London Artists’ Moving Image) Fellowship. Additional support from Forma Arts and Media.
