Collective

s the opening credits of Alexander Nanau’s rolled at a screening at TIFF, a fellow critic leaned to me and whispered, in a mantra-like tone, the name of an indelible Chinese documentary: . The implied message was tacitly understood: that Xu Xin’s colossal 2010 work on the aftermath of the eponymous Chinese fire (in which 325 people were killed, 288 of them schoolchildren) was the kind of landmark filmic memorial capable of speaking to tragedy of such a scale, the archetype to which a film like might aspire, and invariably be diminished in comparison. Where is effectively a protracted vigil among the still grieving families of the deceased children, operates in a less elegiac framework, acting