Over a small jetty, a cruise ship waits to dock and its passengers get ready to dismount. The process is unrushed, methodical; a throng of walkers, with the odd motorcyclist interspersed among them, head onto land while, from the other end, several people await their turn to board behind a gate. The camera completes one full circle, unhurriedly, capturing a boy seemingly caught in the act of littering a slip of paper and trying to pass it off by dancing the floss. From this quick ethnographic snapshot arrives a sprawling city symphony, running in parallel with the Qinhuai river that bisects the urban agglomeration of Nanjing. Over a calmly enervating runtime of 145 minutes, Xinyang Zhang’s Panda unspools its multiple narrative threads, each gently, fleetingly intersecting one another. Each thread charts the course of daily life for a denizen dwelling, apparently, on the periphery of modern city living — some tend to their routines, others seek out more esoteric, more revelatory ways of being.
Modern life is hereby watered down to its most stubborn elements: at once insignificant and rebellious, the margins of Chinese society linger in an eternal present, battered by the detritus of rapid development but not yet beaten into oblivion. Instead, a poetic logic traces through the flotsam, brimming with quiet defiance of the atomized and anonymized wider population that has come to represent the resplendent demographic success of contemporary China. A young woman (Jiahe Lyu), clocking in to work at her textile store, gets embroiled accidentally in an adjoining fistfight; at home, as her mother tends to her wounds, the absence of her abusive father lingers in the air. A cook (Ruyin Zhang) slices his finger off when startled by a passing mongrel; the dog swallows it, along with his wedding ring, the final thing to commemorate his dead wife. Wounds and healing, as with dying and resurrection, form the backdrop of Panda’s unvarnished yet elegiac tableaux, onto which the hazy skyline of its faraway city is etched. Both vanishingly distant and intimately corporeal, Nanjing becomes, for better or worse, a site for grand dreams to exist alongside more quotidian ones.
Zhang’s aimless, freewheeling structure proves conducive for moments of sublime visual poetry, as when a drifter (Han Chen), proclaiming himself a divine being on a quest to find a dragon, wanders into the sewers along the outskirts of town, a string of plastic bottles trailing haphazardly behind him. The man is unkempt, possibly schizophrenic; his presence nonetheless inspires a ragtag underground band to make their music, performing it in the subterranean confines beyond the reaches of the society they find so alien. Zhang, a protégé of Jia Zhangke, brashly reinvents the master’s strokes for his long-gestating debut, mounting a punishing if uncompromising paean to an impolite society in retreat from the world. Deferring less to vulgar taste, as did Guo Zhenming’s Tedious Days and Nights with the underground Rubbish Poetry movement, Panda instead romanticizes solitude, its titular animal symbolic not just of the film’s grayscale monotony, but also the inherent worth and sacredness bestowed on solitary individual life.
The film’s stylistic flourishes are numerous: some predictable, such as the smatterings of color dotted throughout the monochrome, others more elusive and moving, including the textual overlay of verses onscreen, as written and spoken by a doctor purporting to cure most ailments with the power of poetry. Bearing a strong conceptual similarity with Chen Deming’s Always, also a hybrid documentary about the irreversible tides of modernization in China, Panda is more sui generis in form than the prosaic realities it nonetheless depicts, of poverty, malady, and despondency. Its Mandarin title borrows from a treatise of cold diseases compiled some time in the 3rd century AD, and as with most compilations, the organizing principle can only dictate so much. The narrative is sometimes impenetrable, often unfocused. That may very well be the reason for its endangered status, and precisely the cause for its salvation.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2026 — Dispatch 2.
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