A Pile of Ghosts

The real estate agent curves through the sprawling speculative landscape on a golf cart, adding up names, numbers and products: Ocean Boulevard, Central Beach Road, Lakeside Club, 250,000 square meters, freshly planted hedges, non-slip tiles, themed clubs and fishing spots, a children's playground, three swimming pools, a clinic, a hotel, a beauty salon for pets. The marketing tour has something of a performance about it, with words circulating through various bodies and objects. “Innovation is the soul, technology makes the city” can be read on a gigantic billboard and a concrete mixer promises: "Building with heart". So it is only logical that in Ella Raidel's cinematic exploration of Chinese ghost towns, an actress promotes herself like the very latest commodity: “My name is Box. I'm 1.63 m tall and weigh 46 kg ... An actress should be like a box ... We have to give the director what she wants”. Raidel's film, which marks the provisional conclusion of her extensive research project "Of Haunted Spaces", uses the scenic quality of the locations as a starting point for a puzzle game. A Pile of Ghosts shows construction workers and estate agents at work - in authentic and staged settings, in casting scenes and in changing roles. The so-called reality turns out to be increasingly porous, with hard fault lines appearing in the retort-like environment. On a building site there are instructions not to "shit" behind the building. And in the dilapidated "Swallow Hotel" in the hills of Chongqing, the dandyesque hotel owner Charles defies the turbocapitalist urbanisation process amid the persistent noise of construction. "Dead new buildings and ruins, estate agent and actor, documentary and fiction, simulation and lived experience, the sound of a jackhammer and the romantic melody of an old Hollywood film: A Pile of Ghosts layers the seemingly disparate building blocks into the titular 'pile'. In the end, one ghost story takes over the other." (Esther Buss)