Inauguration

Directed by Peng Zuqiang

Inauguration looks at the fragmented history of the Young China Association. Interweaving temporal connections with faint chances of synchronous events between two disparate events at the margins of Chinese revolutionary history: a failed assassination and an impossible trip. The film narrates a forecast of the past, wherein it renders visible the processes of erasure, remembrance, and archival anchors of the early overseas Chinese revolutionary politics and its aftermaths. Movements, geographies, and events do not follow a linear arch but rather are scattered across memories and places, only to be treated as residues, witnesses or simply discards of the history. What happens when the premise of the story is, in fact, the assurance of its erasure?