The rest of the crew had scattered decades ago. The director, a fierce woman named Lin, had emigrated to Canada and died of cancer in 2009. The cinematographer, Old Fang, had gone blind from diabetes. The young players in the film—pimply, earnest, terrible at interviews—were now grandparents. Chen kept in touch with none of them. He kept only the reel.
Chen had been the sound recordist on the shoot. It was his first job out of film school, a school that had since been demolished to make way for a shopping mall. He remembered the weight of the Nagra III on his shoulder, the smell of cigarette smoke and sweat in the gymnasium, the particular thwock of a celluloid ball against a blade of rubber and wood. He had captured that sound. It was, he sometimes thought, the only perfect thing he had ever made. film pingpong
The next day, he walked to the electronics market. A teenager sold him a USB film scanner for two hundred yuan. It took Chen three days to figure out how to connect it to the laptop he borrowed from a neighbor. He unspooled the film in his kitchen, the light carefully dimmed, and fed it through the scanner inch by inch. The process took nine hours. His hands trembled. The splices held. The rest of the crew had scattered decades ago