Daisy is Gone
Director: Ziyao Liu
United States, 2024, 13 min
Festival Year:2025
Category:Narrative Short
Genres:Comedy, Absurd, Sci-fi
Crew:Writer-Director: Ziyao Liu. Producers: Joyce Yueyi Xing, Sophie Changhui Shi.
Email:daisyisgone2021@gmail.com
Synopsis
An absurdist sci-fi with comedic overtones, Daisy is Gone follows an anthrophobic Chinese poet, Meng, as he tries to return a cloned Goldfish, which he believes to be a botched imposter of his lost pet and best friend.
Trailer
About the director
Ziyao Liu is a writer-director based on Earth.
She creates character-driven narratives of hybrid genres. Her goal is to reveal characters’ strengths and weaknesses in everyday moments and reimagine their lives that are otherwise constrained by reality. She loves to find humor in the absurdity of our existence beyond language and cultural barriers.
A member of BAFTA Connect and a fellow of Armed with a Camera, she earned her MFA in Directing from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her BA in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Born in China and now a resident alien in Los Angeles, she spends her free time tending her plants and walking in her neighborhood.
Filmmaker's note
Daisy is Gone explores the theme of grief and human connection by adopting an absurdist, comedic, and science-fictional approach to ease the seriousness of the subject matter for the audience. It’s a common human experience across cultures yet often willfully neglected or suppressed because the social expectation in the modern capitalist world is to “be happy.” The choices of these genres also result from my reflection that certain problems we have as human beings are not resolved by ever-advancing technology.