The Administrators’ Fortnight, a parallel program inside the Cannes Movie Pageant, has lengthy been one of many world’s most revered platforms for modern and unbiased cinema. Established in 1969 by the French Administrators Guild, the part is famend for spotlighting distinctive cinematic voices and has hosted landmark movies by auteurs resembling Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. Its curatorial emphasis on creative freedom and distinctive cinematic voices has made it a key platform for filmmakers who problem standard storytelling.
On the 2025 Administrators’ Fortnight in Cannes, When the Geese Flew made a robust impression, in no small half because of the evocative cinematography of Zhejian Michael Cong. The movie was praised by critics for its emotional readability and lyrical restraint. Amber Wilkinson of Eye for Movie known as it “an completed quick with the center and soul of an American indie,” highlighting how the digital camera stays near the protagonist’s shifting feelings. Stephen Saito of The Moveable Fest equally famous that Cong’s lens “finds the fantastic thing about Cyrus discovering his wings,” emphasizing the movie’s swish emotional arc and understated energy.
Directed by Arthur Homosexual, this quietly riveting quick tells the story of Cyrus, a teenage boy desperately making an attempt to recuperate his sister’s stolen dust bike in a final try and preserve her from leaving residence. Beneath Cong’s lens, the movie transcends narrative realism to evoke a uncooked, tactile emotional expertise. Cong’s cinematography in When the Geese Flew stands out not just for its visible magnificence, however for the profound intentionality behind each shot. From the outset of pre-production, Cong and the director made a decisive option to shoot on 16mm Kodak movie, opting particularly for the 7219 500T inventory. This determination was not merely aesthetic; it was philosophical.
“The second the digital camera begins rolling, everyone seems to be conscious that actual movie is passing by way of the gate, that each second prices cash,” Cong displays. “So, your entire forged and crew turns into so targeted.”t
That sense of gravity is deeply felt all through the movie: every body hums with an depth and presence that digital codecs typically fail to seize.
The grain and sensitivity of the 500T inventory proved essential in visualizing the story’s emotional terrain. Set in a small city marked by quiet desperation and looming departure, the movie’s environment wanted to really feel concurrently intimate and unflinching. Cong’s cinematography solutions that problem with grace. The lighting transitions, shifting seamlessly between interiors and stark exteriors, are executed with a deft contact, whereas the textured grain imparts a type of brutal lyricism to the visuals. The world Cong renders is without delay grounded and fragile, mirroring the movie’s central themes of adolescence, loss, and the painful act of letting go.
Critics additionally pointed to the movie’s deep sense of place, with Twizel, New Zealand serving as a quiet but potent character. The barren seascapes and stark interiors don’t merely function backdrops, however echo the protagonist’s interior desolation, additional blurring the road between fiction and lived actuality.
This was Arthur’s first time capturing on movie, and Cong’s expertise and calm confidence proved important. “Again and again, I reassured him: ‘Have some religion,’” Cong recollects. The sentiment of religion is greater than only a backstage anecdote. It’s a artistic ethos that defines Cong’s physique of labor. Educated initially as a cinematographer and later as a director at Columbia College, Cong brings a uncommon twin fluency in picture and emotion. His method is just not about spectacle, however about resonance: capturing these fleeting, unscripted moments when one thing actual breaks by way of.
Certainly, When the Geese Flew matches seamlessly into Cong’s critically acknowledged filmography, which incorporates celebrated shorts like Windy Days and Stranded, and his directorial debut Midnight Solar, a quiet however unflinching meditation on masculinity and vulnerability. Throughout these works, Cong returns repeatedly to the immersive, emotionally sincere visible language that has change into his hallmark. His cinematography is not only technically completed—it’s guided by an intuitive understanding of the way to form rhythm, tone, and silence into one thing deeply human.
To see Cong’s work acknowledged on a worldwide stage like Cannes is each becoming and overdue. When the Geese Flew is just not solely a technical achievement but additionally an inventive assertion—a reminder that religion in a single’s instruments, collaborators, and instincts can result in extraordinary cinema. The movie’s resonance lies not in overt drama, however in its means to rework intimate human experiences into common emotion. In a pageant season full of daring voices, Zhejian Michael Cong’s imaginative and prescient stood out for its quiet energy, lyrical precision, and unwavering integrity—marking him as a filmmaker whose voice resonates far past nationwide or stylistic boundaries.