Description

With seamless grace, shooting on 16 mm, and underscored by a soundtrack from Brian Eno, German director Jonas Bak moves from the tall spires of the Black Forest to the teeming skyscrapers of Hong Kong in his tranquil, deeply moving feature debut.

Anke retires from her job at the church in a small town in the Black Forest. She looks forward to reuniting with her children over the summer holidays by the Baltic Sea, at a place where they used to live as a young family, and where she lived her best years. At the last minute, her son Max is unable to join them because of protests that are bringing Hong Kong, where he lives, to a standstill. She has been out of touch with him for many years and after an otherwise uneventful summer and facing the void of retirement, she decides to visit him. A mother wants to check in on her children every now and then, but Hong Kong is also her adventure, her escape. She must spend a few days there by herself until Max returns from a worktrip. Protest-ridden Hong Kong is an enigmatic new world to her through which she moves carefully. Through conversations with strangers, she gradually settles in. A young woman who is sad to leave Hong Kong, Max’s doorman, a psychiatrist, a fortune teller and a social activist. These encounters and her experience of the city help her to break down the inner walls she constructed years ago and make way for a new chapter in her life.

Reviews

“This modest but beautifully shot and edited film contains some of the last images of
daily life in a free Hong Kong that we’ll ever see.”
— Amy Taubin, Artforum

“All of the evocatively warm energy at the center of Jonas Bak’s “Wood and Water,”
tension roils along the edge of each frame.”
—David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“The nearly abstract transition from Germany to Hong Kong […] has to be one of the most beautifully accomplished sequences of the year so far. ”
–David Hudson, Criterion Daily

“I was especially taken by Jonas Bak’s gentle charac-ter study […] it’s in the brief encounters, the small talk and the unspoken hurt that our heroine comes to life.”
–Beatrice Loayza, The New York Times

“It is a film that is alive and full of life. […] There are small revelations that work together to create a real emotional punch. […] Days passed and it was still haunting me.”
–David Kopian, Unseen Films

“Wood and Water is one of those films that gets so much right for so long that it’s actually a bit nerve-wracking. Is the filmmaker going to make a misstep? First-time feature director Jonas Bak doesn’t err”
–Michael Sicinski, Letterboxd

“A calm exploration of the way the space taken by maternal love can be redefined, and an invitation to the voyage rich in de-licate propositions on matters such as distance, human contact and spirituality, studied from the most simple scale.”
–Fabien Lemercier, Cineuropa

“Wood and Water casts a sympathetic eye across trans-continental family bonds, growing older, and finding connection in an increasingly chaotic world. Here the inevitable, the uncontrollable, and the senseless prove common ground for kindness and discovery rather than alienation.”
–Carmen Paddock, One Room with a View