50th Ottawa International Animation Festival
Film Festival Ottawa, Canada

Artists: SUN Xun 孙逊 | 

Ten years in the making, Sun Xun’s Magic Atlas is an astonishing journey through myth, memory, power and reincarnation. Guided by a magical star atlas, an apprentice named Xiaozhi travels across shifting identities and worlds including Luocha, a coal empire without history or memory where flight is forbidden.

Created through woodcut animation, ink painting, contemporary painting and Persian miniature, the film unfolds less like a conventional narrative than a dreamlike cosmology. Buddhist ideas of rebirth intersect with Northeast Chinese folk traditions, Tungusic shamanism, political allegory and imagery drawn from ancient Egypt and Cold War Europe. Its changing visual forms create a world that feels at once ancient, futuristic and eerily contemporary.

At once a spiritual odyssey, political parable and meditation on art itself, Magic Atlas resists easy explanation. Sun asks viewers not simply to understand, but to feel: to remain alert, sceptical and open to the mystery of images. The result is a singular animated feature that invites us to peer through the cracks of reality and glimpse the forces—visible and invisible—that shape our lives. (Chris Robinson)

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