Xiaolu Wang is a self-taught filmmaker. She identifies as a Chinese transplant who grew up in the Muslim autonomous region in Northwestern China and now resides in the occupied indigenous homelands of the Dakota people, the Twin Cities. She believes in using lived experiences as materials for her films and for directing. Dumpling (饺子), her first narrative short, blends traditional narrative with magical realism to reflect on the struggle to belong.
Xiaolu Wang
We Are the Wind We've Been Waiting for: Send Me to the Clouds
“There’s one problem in the world neither science nor philosophy could solve,” Mr. Li, an elder at the end of his life, says to Sheng Nan in Teng Congcong’s Send Me to the Clouds after her ugly fight with her emotionally fragile mother. “That’s the fear of dying.” Filmmaker Xiaolu Wang reflects on the film’s inquiry into the value of life at the threshold of death, and the effortlessness in finding pleasure in one’s own hands.