Huang Weikai’s Disorder was mentioned by The Moving Image Source in its 2010 poll of top moving image moments among filmmakers, scholars, critics and programmers. Movie City News editor Ray Pride singled the film out as his highlight of 2010:
Huang Weikai’s 58-minute Disorder, featured at Hot Docs 2010, is a black-and-white shot-on-video portrait of urban Guangzhou, but it’s also a sustained fury of delirium. Tossed into a maelstrom of deracinated images from Huang’s native province, we’re left adrift and agog at brief scenes of traffic jams, floods, accidents, police violence, fools winding through lanes of heavy traffic, and so many, many farm animals gone astray. Programmer Sean Farnel has gone beyond considering Disorder a “city symphony,” merely saying it’s set in “Chris Marker-ville,” and Huang’s film is indeed an act of sustained bricolage, essaying contemporary China through a reported 1,000 hours of footage from amateur shooters, creating an eruptive, hallucinatory landscape, resisting narrative, that is both tactile and otherworldly. It may be the first great film of the 22nd century.
In The Atlantic, Hua Hsu declared Disorder “one of the most mesmerizing films I’ve seen in ages” when he saw it at the Reel China Documentary Biennial. Read reports from Disorder’s Reel China screening by Carol Wang and Mirela David.
Disorder is available in North America through dGenerate Films. Watch a trailer below: