Bodyshop

Description

The ghost of a young soldier sexually assaulted by his Lieutenant says goodbye to his mother and travels the world to see his transgender sister. He is a charming ghost and by possessing living bodies, he meddles with romances of his unfaithful lovers along the way in Taiwan, Japan, Spain, Thailand. He meets a “soul mate” amid the massive protests of today’s Hong Kong. They take shelter in a disguised garage where human bodies are treated in a way beyond moral limits.

Running Time: 89mins
Written, Produced & Directed by SCUD
Cinematography By Meteor Cheung (HKSC) / Production Design by Irving Cheung / Music by Yu Yat Yiu / Edited by GJames Cheung

Main Cast
Adonis He/ Simon Athena/ Christopher Tsang/ Lina Tsai/ Tank Liu/ Karen Huang/ Daniel Benjamin/ Eriks Nguyen/ Nicky Bunyarit/ Invanz/ Joe Leung

• 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam – Official Selection and Focus Director
• 52^th International Film Festival Rotterdam – Official Selection
• 33^rd Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival – Official Selection and Focus Director
• Reeling: The 40^thChicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival – Official Selection
• 26^th PinkApple Queer Film Festival – Official Selection

“The horny ghost of a young man traverses the globe, stalking and debating with his past lovers.

Scud is interested in the overlap between tradition and modernity, and the ways of spirituality vis-à-vis technology. He uses clips from his previous works, mainly Thirty Years of Adonis (2017), to blur the ever-so-fragile line between documentary and fiction, the actors and their roles. The characters, ghostly and living alike, carry their stories and in them, we hear powerful statements about the lingering effects of personal, social and political trauma.

Bodyshop is a work of subversion that takes scenes of uninhibited sex and musical interludes as its tools to dare us to think the unthinkable. It doesn’t shy away from suicide, violence or love expressed cannibalistically, calling out issues from the spheres of intimate relations to politics at large. Scud conjures a type of cinema that intermingles Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Greenaway and John Waters.

On the one hand, Bodyshop is defiantly offhand and proudly camp at its narrative core. On the other, the film is as slick as a TV commercial, thanks to an unmistakably digital sheen and a syrupy soundtrack.

– Adrian Martin and kijA”

Information Sources: IFFR 2024

More：Adonis He / Tank Liu / Simon Tam / Lina Tsai / Daniel Benjamin / Karen Huang / Joe Leung / Derek Lai / Jason Lee / Teslin