December Rumbles is an experimental short film by Ziyang Liu, a Chinese independent filmmaker who graduated from Boston University with a degree in film production. Through film and video installations, he explores existential myths and the lingering trauma of youth in urban settings. The story begins with four youngsters having a tennis match after the abrupt dismantling of the pandemic. The tennis ball, which resembles vestiges from the past years, flies off the court and blurs the boundary between reality and illusion. The four soon embark on a journey in search of it. Wandering and adventuring in memories and dreams, they embark on a journey in search of it, where daydreams, confusion, and disillusionment entangle, piercing them now and then.
Rino: The theme of this year’s edition is #Sports. After watching this film, I had the feeling that it perfectly responds to the subject matter in two dimensions. One is the natural movement of the characters themselves – we see them playing tennis in the film and moving around in different scenes. The second is the flow in time and space. The tennis court, which served as a field, has somehow become the starting point of scenario shifts, both temporally and spatially. Could you elaborate on these two dimensions, respectively?
Ziyang: The reason I chose to start the film on the tennis court is that the film was shot around December 2022. That’s when the pandemic period ended in mainland China. After that, I started to play tennis. Therefore, it’s based on what I did during that time.
Rino: What kind of spirits or inspiration can you get from this particular sport? When you play that, what’s your exact feeling that makes you decide to put it into the film’s subject?
Ziyang: Speaking of the theory behind this film, I think tennis is about someone who reconnects with others. After the pandemic, I lost focus and confidence in my life. Because of it, we cannot do everything easily, like meeting with friends as we want. Tennis is an outdoor sport. I choose to play it to have a better connection between me, the world, and the people. When I pick up the tennis racket, I like to play forehand and backhand. The contact with the tennis ball gives me a feeling of having some control over life, and the emotion is expressed when I started to play this sport.
RIno: It’s quite interesting to see that at the beginning of the film, you didn’t show the realistic scene of them playing tennis. Instead, when the characters are playing “tennis” on the tennis court, there’s no physical object in their hands. So my question is, what’s your idea of such a design?
Ziyang: On the one hand, it’s kind of paying homage to the film Blow Up(1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni. I think the way Antonioni tried to portray the film ends up in the scene with people playing tennis with an invisible tennis ball. On the other hand, it’s an attempt to portray the emptiness or the feeling of loss during the 1960s or 1970s in England. For me, it’s a different time. It’s about 60 years later. But this is a different kind of numbness or loss of feeling in the young generation. So I chose to start the film in this way.
Rino: In your script writing, how were you supposed to transfer such a feeling that was in the ’60s or ’70s to the current age that we’re living in? And how are you supposed to connect these two different ages that have such a big gap temporally?
Ziyang: Actually, I didn’t have script scenes in the making of this film to connect the story. In every stage, I used a treatment to direct the actors about what they did in different scenes. After I got the footage, I tried to get a storyline from it in the editing period. But from the very first beginning, I didn’t have a script.
Rino: You talked about Antonioni. For me, a couple of scenes in the film, such as the mirrors reflecting in the woods, reminded me of Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (2008). And the gaze and fiddling of some natural scenes took me back to poetic movies like The Metamorphosis of Birds (2020). I’m quite curious about the film references you had or you decided to choose in your pre- production process.
Ziyang: Yes, I watched The Metamorphosis of Birds, of course. I liked that film very much because, for me, I was a visual person compared to a story person. I started to make the film from the visual part, but not the story part. For this film, after the location scouting, I will develop the story from the location perspective, not from the story perspective, to choose the spot. Kind of like Hong Sang-soo, I think.
Rino: What’s special about the locations that you chose, as they were mainly shot in some areas of Beijing?
Ziyang: I think all of these things happened around the time when I shot in May 2023, which is about half a year later when the pandemic ended. The location I chose visually expressed the feeling that everything had resumed after such a long time. There are a lot of vestiges from the past years, from 2020 to 2023.
Unlike the urban area, where there’s no trace of the pandemic but a completely fresh feeling, as if nothing has stopped in the past few years, the suburb gives you a sense of disruption where every sector is crying out for revival due to neglect. So I think this scene is quite special.
Rino: You talked about the pandemic as well. In the film, I noticed there’s a scene where several people dressed like K.K.K. members, one of whom holds a thermometer moving behind a mirror. In the end, in front of a cracked mirror, he kidnaps a boy into a room flashing some red light, which is like a dark room for film reels, as well as a dangerous signal, such as an alarm going off. After that, the monologue mentions the disappearance of the film. What’s the meaning of this scene? Could it be understood as the impact or influence brought by the COVID-19 epidemic on the film industry?
Ziyang: That’s an interesting topic to talk about. Of course, it’s concerning the impact and the influence brought by the pandemic. The second point is that during the last few years, I didn’t have very stable jobs or connections with society and my friends. I watched a lot of films during that period. For me, this reflects on my memories at that time. It brought me back to thinking about the essence of the film.
The white, ghostly figures somewhat resembling those of the K.K.K. members symbolized the terror and the sense of insecurity to me that we are not able to control. In that period, we didn’t have much power to change. Before 2020, a lot of my friends lived in Beijing, but during these few years, they gradually disappeared from there for a variety of reasons. They went to other cities, but not Beijing. Even I, who has lived in Beijing for my entire life except for my four years of undergrad, moved to Shanghai. There is always something we cannot control.
Rino: You showed your attention to the vestiges in Beijing and the loss and memories that are gone forever. I felt the electronic-like music and the mixture of various sounds in the film, to a very large extent, create an intrinsic sense of a certain space. Can you tell us more about how you worked with the sound designer and music composer to convey such a feeling?
Ziyang: Yeah. The music composer is actually an experimental music producer who is based in Germany. I liked his music for a long time. So I contacted him and tried to use them in this film. I think it creates something suspenseful and intense in the church scene.
Rino: It sounds like he’s already had a piece of music, rather than making the music for certain scenes.
Ziyang: Yes. The sound designer’s name is Bobo Lau. He’s a famous film sound designer in the film industry, both domestically and internationally. Firstly, I sent the first rough cut of this film to him. And we had some phone calls to get the mood of this film. I think he was making this film as a fashion project because he used the elements from his archive to optimize visuality.
Rino: It’s interesting to know that while we say this film is nostalgic, you mentioned that the sound designer tried to embed the mood of fashion. I noticed you also have a fashion background. How did you balance these two contrasting senses in the film?
Ziyang: I didn’t make the film in a very realistic way, because as you can see, the four characters in this film are wearing tennis suits but not dressed like real recreational tennis players. They are wearing a tennis headband like a choker or a scarf on their necks, and I think that was partly from my fashion background. Besides that, the other elements in this film do not have the intention to be in fashion. At the beginning, it was a fashion film, but after the preparation, I thought I could do it more cinematically to bring it to a more thematic approach. I love fashion films, because they have some methods like those in experimental films. They’re not trying to make every film in the same way.
Rino: You said you had no actual script for this film, but the arrangement of the footage is actually very fragmented, just like the jigsaw puzzle pieced together by the girl under the shade of a tree in the film. I wonder how you managed to compile these images that have no superficial or obvious connection in your shooting and editing?
Ziyang: For the shooting part, I think it’s all based on the location and the chronology of the shooting. The editing part took me half a year to finish, because I was trying to get a clear storyline of the whole film. I tried a lot of different arrangements of the footage and finally, I chose a simple method by only using these voice-overs to connect everything together. At the beginning,
I’m trying to tell a story where every friend fell behind one by one after the journey. Then I used the voice-over to network with them. Efficient as it may not seem to be, I think it clearly expressed what I wanted to tell from the story.
Rino: For me, the film seems to always attempt to guide the audience’s vision, but it ultimately fails to form a focus. Instead, I think only in the reflection of the mirror surface are we able to see what is invisible in the frame, as if the narrator in the film, who says he’s waiting for the storm without seeing any raindrops. So what I want to know is that through the integration of various media in the film, is there any intention that you want the audience to “see” or do you expect them to dig out something more attractive from such an invisibility?
Ziyang: The visual element placed in different scenes is kind of unclear for the audience to get a story. That is why I chose the voiceover to connect them. But I tried to encourage the audience to get the subtle connection between this element and the rearrangement to understand the reason and the situation why the young people in China are lost in this generation. I recently got to know a term called Gen-Z stareness. I think it is an expression of how the young generation feels in this time period.
Due to the employment pressure and the economic situation in China, many people are facing a cut-throat competition. I have been working for a while now, and I do feel that the workplace environment in China is kind of toxic. People are working extreme, mandatory overtime that gives birth to a pervasive culture called “involution”, which forces employees into relentless internal competition and sacrificing personal life. This high-pressure environment, often coupled with authoritarian management and a lack of transparency, leads to widespread burnout and significant mental exhaustion among staff. So I think Gen-Z stareness expresses this kind of feeling to the world, and to different age periods.
Rino: Regarding some of the current situations and issues that you’re concerned about, why did you embrace such an experimental approach for this film instead of making it into a more narrating feature, as I noticed that your previous work, Lethargy and a Failed Work (2024), is more like a feature short?
Ziyang: I think the abstract things are more appealing to me. It’s naturally born in me. I have some feelings for the visual elements, not the cinematic story itself.
Lethargy and a Failed Work was a story that happened in a drama theater. It was an attempt for me to do a narrative. After that, I found it’s not the perfect way for me to tell a story. I was in confusion after shooting that film.
The experimental approach was something I tried after it. The film education I got at Boston University was basically trying to get you into the American film industry and to make some entertaining or more dramatic films. After spending those four years and graduating from the college, I tried to make some new attempts.
Rino: What will your future orientation be? Or what kind of genres would you follow in the future?
Ziyang: As I said before, I was in a company now, working as an in-house videographer, which really made me feel the toxicity of the Chinese workplace environment. Maybe in the future, I will try to get back into filmmaking. I will also try to learn some AI-generated content. For me, I was not interested in working in a super large crew to make some franchise films. I was a little bit comfortable in a smaller crew, like around 10 people. The fewer people, the better.
Speaking of this, because this film is arranged in four parts, the gap between chapters may be distinct. So I think it’s good to present in an art gallery compared to the cinema. It will be interesting to display it on four different screens for the audience. I saw some experimental works like 24 Frames (2017) and The Works and Days (2020). They are good examples to present in an art gallery as a kind of medium. I think I should make some efforts to film in VR or XR.
Actually, one of the references of December Rumbles is Leviathan (2012) from Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, an experimental documentary. When they shot the film, they placed a series of GoPros on a fishing ship to capture the footage, and they made the whole journey feel like a machine or a creature to catch fish, suggesting the environmental destruction caused by human activities. At the beginning, I was trying to use the same method as well, to portray Beijing after the end of the pandemic. But in the end, I used a more narrative way.
Rino: The film was shortlisted for some festivals, such as Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and the 86358 Jia Village Film Festival. Now it is coming to the UK. How do you feel about that?
Ziyang: Actually, December Rumbles is the first film of mine that starts a festival run. So I was very excited. During the time in Jia Village, I met a lot of old and new friends. I could feel their enthusiasm for filmmaking because at the time, the film industry was in decline. Seeing them making films in their own way, still insisting on watching and producing films, is a very exciting thing.
Due to the time and the travel, I can’t be in the Odyssey in person, but I am excited to have December Rumbles meet the audiences in the UK. Hope they enjoy it.
Rino: We’re very happy to have you for our interview today, and thank you so much for your time and for all your inspirational dialogues. I think the audience can get to know more about the story from this interview, and I hope they all enjoy the film.
December Rumbles is part of In Competition at Odyssey 2025, its UK Premiere took place on 16 Sep at RICH MIX.
