Filmmaker Ruiqi Lu’s experimental feature film made its North American debut last month at Fantasia International Film Festival
Mundaneity can be comforting, but it can also be stifling. Suffocating, and disorienting. In first-time filmmaker Ruiqi Lu’s debut experimental feature film Contact Lens 河马皮肤—which had its North American premiere as an official selection in the Underground Program of the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival in July—the routine life of a young woman is interrogated and examined to the minutiae, not with an invasive microscopic attitude, but with the close observation of a woman’s eye. Or a woman seeing the world with the aid of contact lens to be more precise.
The film opens with a young Chinese woman (Yunxi Zhong) in her mid 20s standing at the waist-high white ceramic sink in her white-tiled bathroom. Though she rubs the sleep from her eyes, her vision of the world doesn’t clear up. It’s all still fuzzy and undefined until she puts in her contact lens, then the world comes into focus to the sound of the camera’s aperture being set. In response to a repetitive, intrusive beeping, she frustratedly shouts, “I know!”
As the young woman prepares for her day, the camera focuses on a projection screen hanging in her living room, which shows footage of a woman with blonde hair (Yanli Dai), sitting at her own dining table preparing her breakfast—juxtaposed against our nameless protagonist pouring milk into her bowl of cereal before taking her own careful spoonfuls.
Contact Lens (which in pinyin hémǎ pífū interestingly translates to hippopotamus skin in Chinese 河马皮肤) is a methodically planned, constructed and filmed study on how the routines of our lives, and more specifically women’s lives, can subtly change from comforting and dependable to stifling and oppressive. How many times can a woman do the same things in the same order, every day with seemingly no emotional gain and purpose until she wants to break free of the invisible constraints she isn’t even aware of? At what age does conformity start to take root and become ingrained?
Lu asks this question with the introduction of a little girl—almost a mini version of Zhong’s character—whose mother (whose body is never fully revealed beyond the top of her waistline) brings her to afterschool Mandarin lessons. In her exercise book, she writes the characters for rain, escape, and river fish, each one repeated dozens of times until she’s correctly formed each stroke and line in the carefully predetermined order dictated by the rules of Mandarin. In these pages, Lu is sending a subliminal message to not only her characters, but to her audience.
That message is to enjoy the rain as it falls, seek escape when the chance arises, and swim against the current. Don’t go with the flow. In speaking about her characters, Dai’s character provides a window into the world of women that hasn’t really progressed despite all of modernity’s conveniences.
This woman’s life exists within the confines of her kitchen, with appliances that date back to the mid 1950s. Every time the bell of Zhong’s character’s microwave rings, Dai stands up, adjusts her clothing, takes a step forward and quite literally runs into an invisible wall (i.e. the camera lens). This breaking of the fourth wall doesn’t take the audience out of the film-watching experience, but rather piques our curiosity, and disturbs and shakes us out of our reverie to see this woman—and all of the women and girls in the film, as well as those around us—as more than the characters society tells us we’re supposed to be.
There isn’t much by way of dialogue in Contact Lens, and most of it comes in brief moments of conversation between Zhong and a friend whom she films for test footage for an unnamed film project. Zhong films her going up stairs that lead up to nowhere in the house, and closeups of the various tattoos on her body—simply just being. Zhong uses her camera as an extension of her eyes, adjusting the settings until she’s able to observe her surroundings with clear eyes and an unbiased perspective.
As a filmmaker who also took on the mantle of editor and producer, Lu and her production team—including sound designers Shuqian Wei and Sheren Huang, cinematographer Junqian Xie, and colorists Junhing Qian and Yang Hu—all did a brilliant job in conveying the philosophy of “less is more.” There’s no overly dramatic score in the film. Instead the sound of water running through pipes, a camera lens adjusting, glasses being settled down none too gently on tables, and chairs scraping against the floor become just unnerving enough to be as annoying as a fly buzzing just overhead.
Though each character could be perceived as mirror images of each other, it would perhaps be more appropriate to see them as echoes of each other and the women who’ve come before them. Reflections and ripples throughout time, subtly distorted with each era, generation, social advancement, and personal achievement—but not so changed that the original is too far removed to be unrecognizable.
For anyone who’s ever worn contact lenses, there’s always a period of adjustment required not only to wear them physically, but also mentally. There’s something about using our fingers to intentionally put a foreign object over our most delicate and exposed organ that has to be psychologically contended with until it becomes part of daily routine. And Lu using them as an analogy of the struggles women and girls face in order to adjust to society’s invisible barriers, and eventually using them to see these women and girls for who they are and to break through these barriers is simply genius.
