Even Ants Strive For Survival

The film is set in a future when Mandarin has become the official language. Yet, the central government attempts to impose a law that replaces every citizen’s name with a set of numerical codes. In such a social upheaval, Ma Yi (meaning ‘Ant’ in Chinese) cares nothing but cancels an auto-masturbating machine. While Ma Yi doesn’t violate the law, he is however arrested and interrogated by the police. Partly a political satire and partly a Kafkaesque nightmare, the film dramatizes the uncertainty that whether Ma Yi has rebelled against the authority or not. With the tools of black-and-white cinematography and 4:3 aspect-ratio, the director Xia Ren successfully creates a futuristic realm of absurdity that evokes similar vision and experience of the controversial hit, Ten Years, from last year.