After All

Director LIU Chongyan’s After All is set at a university in Berlin and follows a young woman who begins attending regular counselling sessions after discovering that a transgender classmate took their own life. From a detached and restrained observational viewpoint, Liu reconstructs an incident she experienced herself. This is not her first time drawing on something personal—her earlier short Is there a Pine on the Mountain, which we screened previously, does the same.

In this film, through the bleak, stagnant campus and the wind-trembled reflections on the window, a fragile emotional space is created—one that is on the brink of collapse without ever fully tipping over. The film’s power lies in its composed, restrained, and anti-dramatic narrative, provoking a tension that holds the viewer in quiet unease. This is not a cathartic outpouring of grief, but the lingering echo of trauma—one that resists easy resolution and demands time to absorb.

In a final, unexpected gesture, Liu breaks the fiction at the film’s end, taking the viewer to rise above the sealed frame of trauma—as if only by doing so can the living find a way to go on.

– SHEN Wei