Kwok Yun, thirty-something, is having an affair with the married villageschool teacher. But it does not fill the emptiness in her life or satisfy her desire for change. Following one of their countryside trysts, she hears a strange noise and thinks she can see an UFO in the sky. Overcome by a powerful force, she loses consciousness. When she re-awakens, an injured Americas businessman (Udo Kier) is lying next to her. He’s the first Westerner she’s ever seen. She takes him back home and tends to his wounds. Then, suddenly, he vanishes too. But when she reports the UFO incident to Chief Chang, the village leader, she plays it by the rulebook and passes this information on to higher authorities, thus triggering a chain reaction. So while government officials interrogate the villagers about the alleged UFO sighting, Chief Chang seizes the heaven-sent opportunity. Under her management and with the support of nouveau-riche Bill Huang, she uses a UFO information centre to abruptly catapult the village and its inhabitants into the 21st century. Kwok Yun also gets sucked into the vortex of a system that, in the name of progress, has no time for individual dreams. If the future of the village has now been decided by the state, Kwok Yun’s future is very much open.
UFO in Her Eyes is Xiaolu Guo’s second feature film, based on her novel of the same name. It is a satire on the relentless desire for progress in the China of today and relates ultimately of people’s alienation from their own culture.