The Moon, The Sky And You

“If you want to feel the tender part of life, you must first accept it at its cruellest,” says the narrator as the camera slowly zooms out in this film’s opening shot. Two teenage girls are lying on the ground, between them a skinny boy holding a goldfish bowl in which a golden oranda swims.

An hour-long student film whose visual creativity and tender performances suggest an exciting future for those involved, The Moon, The Sky And You screened as part of the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival. Director Lin Hei Yau had originally written a feature-length story but trimmed it down into something he could feasibly make by cutting out all the backstory and exposition. The resulting piece unfolds like a poem, a condensed idea with a more intense impact on viewers, exploring familiar tropes in its own distinctive way.

As far as the boy (Jayden Cheung) is concerned, there is only one girl in the whole world who can hold his attention. Played by Yi Kwan Kwok, she understands that world in a very different way from him. Caught up with a gang of gun-toting school girls who engage in one stand-off after another through the course of the film, she says that violence makes her feel alive. He seems to get a similar feeling from the vulnerability which he experiences when opening himself up to love. Constantly carrying his fish with him, despite it suffering several attacks, seems to represent his own vulnerability and his curious willingness to put himself out there regardless, something which fascinates the girl even as she taunts him.

The viciousness with which some teenage girls treat each other is one of those subjects frequently elided when people reflect on their schooldays, and it’s addressed surprisingly little in cinema. The depictions here don’t feel all that far fetched, allowing for the presence of guns and the almost total absence of adults. An exception is a young teacher who is not that much older than her students and seems at one point to be trying to compete with them for status, establishing authority by demonstrating that she is capable of acts of greater cruelty.

The suffering of fish occupies a difficult place in cinema. It has not traditionally been treated like other forms of animal cruelty. If you relate to fish as fellow living beings in the way that the boy does, you may find parts of this hard to watch, such are the extremes of cruelty which it depicts. They are all carefully staged – rather obviously so in places, which fits with the exploration of ideas around reality, artificiality and constructed environments – and of course it’s interesting to explore that visceral response which many of us have to animal suffering in light of how blasé we have become about human suffering.

Despite these moments of horror, the primary impression which you’re likely to take away from the film is admiration for its moments of startling beauty and the romantic quality which it achieves amidst all of that violence, where its protagonists dare to connect and try to understand one another. The rawness of youth crashes against something eternal in moments of surreal extravagance. It’s remarkable what Lin has achieved on a tiny budget, and one longs to see what he might be able to do with more.