© 2022 Daisy Ziyan Zhang

She Crossed
20’00, USA, 2020-2024

Uprooted and regrowing,
winding through the veins of a building.
A cleaner and a student,
two itinerant women met.
She crossed, she crossed, they crossed...
"But life continues," she said.

ZONTA PRIZE Award Statement by Oberhausen International Short Film Festival  
“A portrait always tells us something about the portrayed and the one portraying. The film in question doesn’t merely portray care work, but creates a cinematic form through rhythm and observation to convey precarity, tenderness and evanescence; the gentle passion as well as aesthetic grandeur of human encounters. Through an homage to a very particular woman, it celebrates intimacy, trust and activities carried out by millions of women around the world without recognition. The protagonist’s love for plants is mirrored in the attention with which the filmmaker turns to the most ephemeral phenomena, be it a raindrop or the passing expression of a face.”