Screening
AI Creation Finalist
Pyre
Chen Si Yuan
China / 06'52'' / In Min Nan with Simplified Chinese and English subtitles
A noir tale of love, revenge, and self-redemption.
Set in a coastal fishing village in southern China, Pyre drifts between sea wind, ancestral worship, and the quiet violence of old beliefs.
Here, water carries both birth and death. Bloodline weighs heavier than a name, and love is slowly twisted into duty, debt, and sacrifice. Through the fractured perception of a young girl, the film enters a damp, fading world where tenderness arrives in fragments, and cruelty hides beneath the language of family.
Temple drums, ritual lanterns, sea offerings, and a burning ceremonial boat form the landscape of her childhood. What she sees is celebration, divinity, and a path toward reunion; what the adults carry is superstition, silence, and an inherited hunger for continuation.
Pyre is not only a tragedy of one family. It is a fever dream washed by tide and fire, where ignorance is mistaken for fate, kinship is offered to bloodline, and the most innocent life is the first to be forgotten.
