Love, Elephant & Tourbillon
In a wealthy neighborhood in Pasadena, California, Chinese-American piano prodigy Jenni Zhao navigates bipolar, queerness, as well as her dysfunctional family in the aftermath of a suicide attempt.
Shan Jiang is an independent writer-director based in Los Angeles and New York City. She holds an MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia University. As an Asian, queer, and female-identifying individual who has spent the past decade studying cinema in the US, Shan is profoundly influenced by New Hollywood and its subversiveness.
Love, Elephant & Tourbillon is about a teenager’s life uncontrollably collapsing on her despite the affluent material life. The elephant stands for “the elephant in the room” as it refers to the obvious lack of listening and communicating in the immigrant household portrayed in the story. At the same time, the Tourbillon refers to the superficial display of wealth, which sometimes is unfortunately mistaken as well-being.
The style of the screenplay embraces a dreamy, surreal quality that is reminiscent of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Robert Altman’s 3 Women. However, the story itself also wishes to shed a light on bipolar disorder along with a teenager’s confusion and anger while navigating awakening queerness and a broken family.
Shan has been finding herself resorting to psychoanalytical narrative approaches while writing the screenplay. As of now, she wishes to continue developing the screenplay to the point where the shallowness of embarrassment and the depth of pain represented in teenagehood collide in the most thought-provoking way.
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