Three Quick Cut questions with filmmaker Ruoyon Chen

QUICK CUTS with Ruoyon Chen

New York No Limits’ Iris Chan spoke with Ruoyon about her film, Eve, Eve, which screened with NYNL on August 11, 2022 Art of the Short event.

With such a timely subject matter of Artificial Intelligence at the forefront of your film, what would you want the audience to take away after watching your film?

Through the film, I want to remind the audience what we have forgotten. I was thinking of the question: "What could be the abilities that humans may never teach AI?" And I think the answer is those abilities that we have already forgotten. I was trying to answer this question in "Eve, Eve" by letting our creations recall those abilities: the abilities to aestheticize nature, to look directly into each other and escape from the first person narratives, to unload the technology to experience the lightness, to be part of the nature and in the end, to be part of each other. --These for me are the ultimate humanity.

Were there any challenges you faced while working on this film, and how did you overcome them?

To finish shooting within 24 hours is the major challenge. Because we need to go to various sites and to capture the sunlight. That was a very intense schedule.

You mentioned that you explored alternative forms of using frames, with split screen, could you share some of your influences for this, as well as in general for the film itself?

At the beginning the split screen gives a sense of surveillance of two AI maids. Because that is what you see when you are in a monitoring room. I want the audience to have that sense of "in control" of some lower level creatures. Later when two AI maids get into the ocean and gain the feeling of life, they also gain their own perspectives. Now the audiences see what they see. They enter their last-minute-life to experience what they see. For reference, I would say later I watched Vortex by Gaspar Noé last year after I finished production of my film and I think he did an excellent job in adopting the split screen to portray the daily life of AD patients.