At first glimpse Nelson Yeo’s intriguing film Dreaming & Dying (Hao jiu bu jian) has a ring of familiarity as a possible romantic triangle offering dramatic options before the storyline spirals off into multiple directions and offers something new and challenging. Things begin in a familiar style at a class reunion at a seaside hotel. Three former schoolmates attend, two of them are married. The husband is something of a boor, while his mild-mannered wife is shy – except when it comes to the other man who they haven’t seen in a while and there remains some kind of attraction between the couple. But before the audience knows it, the film changes direction – yes the possible lovers are in a different story set at the same coastal location and yes their love is still unconsummated but in a wonderfully bizarre twist, he is a merman! Yes…a merman.The film plays with the notion of reality – is this really a fantasy-spin or a link to characters in a book that the wife is filmed reading in the central strand of the storyline? And just when the audience might think they are getting a grip on things, the storyline takes another abrupt change and now we have the husband and wife stuck in the middle of a jungle, carrying a water-filled box containing a fish. They are on a day trip to fàng shēng (an old Buddhist tradition in which believers release fish into the wild to neutralize the karma they committed knowingly or unknowingly). The wife believes that this act will cure the husband of his illness. Lost in the jungle, they are haunted by their own memories and desires, which they believe is a result of their past karma rippling through time. According to the director: With Dreaming & Dying, “I am primarily interested in exploring, interested in how we choose to remember things in our own ways, and as time passes, those fantasies sometimes become realities; the idea that certain things, however meaningless, can take on their own meaning over time”.Mark Adams