Mortals

If a gold fish only has a seven-second memory, how long does life mean to it?

Seven seconds.

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers. Memory measures the length of life by enduing it with meaning. Everything in this world exists only in the memory of each individual, and there is no meaning of any existence after one’s death. A man lives eighty years since he only remembers eighty years of time and forgets everything before and after these eighty years.

Is that our memory disappears because of death, or we die since we forget everything? Memory is the trace of our existence, and also the cage of our lifetime. Life is like a poem of oblivion. The more we forget, the closer we are to death.

The glass container traps the red goldfish, and the transient memory imprisons mortals. Eight strangers, eight pieces of memory from different time and space. As the red goldfish break through the walls of the glass, they together swim into the river of memory, and turn into red petals falling from the sky. Standing in the memories of past and future, the eight mortals breathe as one, feeling their immortality in the eternal flow memory.

Death is just a loss of memory.

Directed by Yunwen Chen (China)