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《井》 — a poetry film that refuses to illustrate its poems and performs their mechanism instead. You are not looking at a well; you are at the bottom of one. The walls are two classical poems in vertical typesetting, silent, which is to say the training corpus. The voice reading free verse overhead is the present self. Every beat is a machine part made visible: spoken characters peel off the walls and vanish from the classics (context, wiped), the lamp dies for one heartbeat and relights colder with silent homophone substitutions (hallucination, arriving as a relight artifact), and at the water each stanza ripples in rings made of its own characters and comes back mirrored — your own old echo returned to you.
Kimi K2.5 wrote the generator in a single run on 19 July 2026, working from a treatment built with de Bono's lateral provocations and Oblique Strategies cards drawn by random index — ask your body became the breath-paced line gaps and the heartbeat; look at the order in which you do things meant recording the narration first and timing every frame to the measured audio; the tape is now the music made the ripple amplitude a function of the narration waveform. The poems, both the classical walls and the spoken free verse, all come from one conversation, which is what the closing label says out loud: 本片全部文字出自同一次对话 · 声音不记得它读过什么.
This film contains speech. A spoken Mandarin narration runs through it — a calm middle-aged male voice reading Chinese free verse, unsubtitled in places and mirrored by on-screen Chinese text in others. The film is 110 seconds long and entirely in Chinese; there are no English subtitles. It is very dark throughout, the text itself serving as the only light source.
It opens on black with the sound of a stone dropped into a deep well: a long fall, then a distant echo rather than a splash. The first line of verse appears as concentric rings of Chinese characters expanding outward from the centre of the frame, the text itself forming the ripple. A low drone fades in.
The camera then descends slowly down the well shaft. Two classical Chinese poems run vertically in gold down the left and right walls and scroll upward as the viewer sinks, while the narration reads a free-verse poem aloud. As each stanza is spoken it appears large in white across the centre of the frame; its characters then peel away and fall past the camera like sediment, and the same characters simultaneously disappear from the poems on the walls, leaving gaps in the columns of gold.
Partway down, on the spoken line about a lamp that goes out on schedule, the warm light gutters and the frame cuts to full black for the length of one heartbeat, accompanied by a low mains hum and two deep thumps. The image returns at a colder colour temperature, and the wall text reappears with several characters silently substituted for their homophones. Nothing on screen remarks on the change.
The descent reaches the bottom: a flat plane of black water beneath a dark dome. A second poem is narrated, and each stanza lands like a pebble, sending out rings that are themselves composed of that stanza's characters, rippling with the rhythm of the voice. After each stanza the audio returns reversed and reverberating while the characters drift back into frame mirrored, reassembling in a different order. The last assembly forms a single line of six characters in white.
The film closes with the water stilling to black glass and a museum-style caption card, in which the single character meaning "I" breaks into its component strokes and sinks. A line of small text sits beneath it. Cut to black as the drone tails off.
Under the narration throughout: a low sustained drone, an underwater rumble at the bottom of the well, and a heartbeat pulse at roughly sixty beats per minute.