Sharing the same title as Chinese classic literature, JOURNEY TO THE WEST is not a story about the Monkey King, but about an ordinary man's continuous pursuit of UFOs in the Chinese countryside.

 

TANG Zhijun, editor-in-chief of Space Exploration magazine, together with his fellows, went to investigate the collective sighting of an unidentified flying object in a village called Burning Nest, where a stone ball disappeared from the mouth of a stone lion.

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The person in question, SUN Yitong, a young man who speaks and acts strangely and has a talent in writing poems, claimed that he received instructions from aliens, saying that to retrieve the stone ball, they should head to Daliang Mountain.

TANG’s team was suspicious, but until TANG witnessed the miracle of SUN’s prophecy, they decided to follow him and embarked on a long journey to a mine cave about to blast. After a drunken night, TANG was told the truth and saw a sight he had never seen before under the guide of SUN.

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The iconic Space Exploration Magazine was a magazine that existed for real in China in the 80s and 90s. It used to arouse the interest of the by-then young generation to explore space and the scientific world.

 

Based on historical reality,  JOURNEY TO THE WEST is a sci-fi film with a nostalgic style. It combines the vintage aesthetic of realism with the genre by collaging footage of different textures, such as VHS images, vintage television broadcasting images, as well as documentation footage. Deep down inside, it is also a film about chasing faded love.

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