Lianpeng Zhao’s Museum of Death
Zhao turns rusted letters and withered flowers into a language of farewell, moving between an outside eye and a soul’s slow point of view.
Play on YouTubeMuseum of Death fits squarely inside Lianpeng Zhao’s visual world: a patient, object-led cinema that translates classical Chinese poetry into sets and small, lingering gestures. Rather than dramatise major beats, Zhao stages rooms full of weathered belongings as repositories of private reckonings — burned letters, a hole in an envelope, dust falling through a ceiling — and lets the camera alternate between an outside eye and the soul’s gaze.
The film’s tonal economy is shaped by choices Zhao has made before: naturalistic lighting from director of photography Zhang Yang, meticulous art-department texture from Liu Jingyi and Zhou Sijie, and a soundscape that places Cantonese opera like a memory drifting in from the street. Shot compositions sometimes feel objective, sometimes intimate, and that swing between perspectives is the film’s signature move.
"I wanted to express a fantasy in which the daughter’s tears cross the boundary between yin and yang, becoming the last drop of medicine that lets the father pass into his next life."
— Lianpeng Zhao, director (the director speaking, not the musical artist; he is the film’s artist).
Credits: photographer / DoP Zhang Yang; art department / designers Liu Jingyi & Zhou Sijie; camera operator Zhou Zixi; sound designer Qili (Cantonese opera element); lead actor Hong Bi; stylist: not credited; director Lianpeng Zhao.
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