I Went to the Zoo the Other Day

Exquisitely photographed in digital black and white, Li's debut feature follows a young Serbian man, Danilo, and his friend Dragana as they wander through the Toronto Zoo on a beautiful summer day. Carefully studying his subjects in long shots and slow pans, accompanied by a cacophony of off-screen voices on the soundtrack, Li subtly dissolves the divide between his characters and the animals they view, drawing a correlation between their mutual conditions as exiles within a fabricated environment. Beautifully rendering the melancholy of alienation and displacement, I Went to the Zoo the Other Day culminates in a haunting reflection on the urban landscape as the protagonists traverse the asphalt wilderness of Ontario's 401 Westbound highway.