‘Have A Nice Day’ Is First Chinese Animated Feature To Compete At Berlin Film Festival

Here is the description of the film from the Berlinale organizers:

A city in southern China and a bag containing a million yuan draws several people from diverse backgrounds with different personal motives into a bloody conflict. Philosophizing gangster bosses, aging hitmen, men and women who are tired of the struggle to survive—anyone who happens to have the bag holds on to it tightly, as if it were a lifeline. Hao ji le is a black comedy; the film’s inscrutable, laconic humor holds up a magnifying glass to attitudes to life and social conditions. Humankind’s constant greed meets a deeply insecure country in transition. The reduced realism of the film’s animated tableau heightens and stylizes the mood in today’s China, caught between stasis and a new beginning. The protagonists of this macabre dance wander, strangely lost, through precisely drawn but radically changing cityscapes. The signs and symbols of capitalism impose themselves everywhere, but most people are excluded from the life these signs promise. And Mao Zedong’s image still graces the banknotes.

France’s Memento Films has international sales rights, while Edko Films is repping in Asian territories.