This Cannes Best Director–winning Asian odyssey spectacularly mashes up time and place, genre and form, to transport audiences somewhere sublime.

In 1917, British diplomat Edward is stationed in Burma and travels by train from Rangoon to Mandalay, where Molly, his fiancée of seven years, is finally arriving to join him. But before her steamship can dock, Edward loses his nerve and flees on the next boat to Singapore. This doesn’t deter the exuberant Molly, who promptly sets off after her cowardly bridegroom. He leads Molly on a chase through Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu and onwards – even through history, transcending storytelling itself.

With this virtuosic and frequently anachronistic travelogue, Gomes marries the documentary immediacy of his Maureen Fazendeiro collaboration The Tsugua Diaries (MIFF 2022) and the glowingly stagey, black-and-white colonial pastiche of Tabu (MIFF 2012), using the work of three credited directors of photography to braid the past and present. This stunning cinematic essay on place and memory is much grander in scope than Edward and Molly’s journey; it demands to be experienced moment to moment. As one wise character recommends: “Abandon yourself to the world, and see how generous it is to you.”

“An enchanting, enlivening, era-spanning, continent-crossing travelogue that runs the very serious risk of infecting you with a potent dose of wanderlust for life.” – Variety

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