Draft:The Kneeling Archer

The Kneeling Archer is a 2023 drama film written by Bruce Gambrill Foster. The film follows Sebastian Brandt, a first-year Columbia University law student, who embarks on a surreal journey to China. Set in Xi'an, China, home to the famous Terracotta Army, the film features American and Chinese leading roles, with cameo appearances by Kevin Rudd, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, and Eric X. Li.

Hailed by critics as "a powerfully original story" and a "slow burning geopolitical drama at the intersection of the world’s two great powers: love and hate," The Kneeling Archer is an unflinching, unapologetic expose of China's peaceful rise to power amidst the drumbeat of Western anti-China messaging.

Plot

Prelude

Sebastian Brandt never wanted to go to law school, never wanted to be a lawyer like his father. Hell, he didn’t really want to go to Columbia except it was far enough away from Baltimore that he might be able to breathe for once in his life. No, Sebastian Brandt never wanted anything more than a pencil or a piece of charcoal and a sketchbook. And if something didn’t happen soon, something that would really shake things up, he’d probably graduate, get a job at Brandt, Hector, Davis carrying water for the old man, marry a woman he couldn’t afford, and live to regret the fact that he never followed his heart.

But something did happen.

Act 1

The film opens in a lecture hall with Professor John Mearsheimer forecasting the coming war with China. Students tap away on their laptops, check phones, listen attentively. Enter Sebastian Brandt, late, a painfully shy, soft-spoken 19-year-old undergraduate. He’s also a two-time Maryland Archery Association junior champion with a love of art and a passion for drawing. After class, he returns to his dorm to pack a bag while his roommate looks on, skeptical of Sebastian’s decision to go on a trip to China without telling his parents. But Sebastian is undeterred. A week before the end of fall term, in the dead of winter, he leaves campus, stopping to sketch a single leaf clinging desperately to the otherwise leafless branches of a tree.

On his way to the subway station, Sebastian stops to buy a sandwich. While he waits in line, CNN reports on wildfires and floods ravaging California, a political row in Washington, and yet another mass shooting, this time in New York’s Chinatown. Food in hand, Sebastian walks past a homeless man sleeping rough outside the station entrance. He stops, ponders the man’s circumstances, and decides he wasn’t hungry after all.  Unable to disturb the man’s slumber, he leans over to set the bag down when the man seizes Sebastian’s wrist violently and with cataract-riddled eyes proclaims in a voice deep as the rumble of thunder, “Behold! Behold! Times change and power passes. It is the pity of the world.” With these prophetic words falling on our protagonist trenchant as an ax, Sebastian’s surreal journey begins in earnest. He descends a subway entrance wreathed in vines, disappears through a preternatural fog, and awakes in the window seat of a China Airlines flight on final approach to Xi’an International Airport, one-time capital of ancient China and home to the famous Terracotta Warrior Museum.

After checking in to his hotel, Sebastian visits the museum where he meets Liling, a young factory worker moonlighting as a tour guide to practice her English, a smart and ambitious woman who, like China herself, is on the rise. At the end of the tour, in a glass display case unto itself, Sebastian sees the Kneeling Archer, the only terracotta warrior discovered completely intact, surviving the ravages of time, water, and the shifting earth in which it lay buried for over two millennia. When he asks Liling why this particular clay soldier survived unbroken when so many thousands did not, she replies, “it was his destiny,” an answer that prefigures Sebastian’s own heroic journey.

Returning to the hotel inspired though exhausted, Sebastian passes through the lobby unnoticed by all but Harold “Harry” Parkes, a pudgy, middle-aged Willy Loman with anger management issues, a conspiracy theorist whose armour plated political certainties render him unimpressionable. He takes note of Sebastian amidst a swarm of black-haired hotel staff and guests, sipping his whiskey and conjuring enemies where there were none. Alone in his room, Sebastian takes out his sketchbook once again to render with deft and confident strokes a self-portrait of a kind, a figure he had seen earlier that day, that had somehow spoken him—the Kneeling Archer. In the background, CNN continues reporting on the Chinatown massacre, calling it a hate crime as most of the victims were of Chinese descent.

After meeting Liling for lunch at a local restaurant, Sebastian accepts an invitation to visit EUPA, the “Factory to the World,” turning out household appliances at the rate of one every twelve seconds, a city the size of Monaco with over twenty thousand employees. There, he meets Gloria Wei, personal assistant to the wise but eccentric factory owner, Chairman Yu, an octogenarian billionaire who fancies himself the incarnation of Qin Shi Huan, China’s first emperor.

Having done her homework on the wayward American, Gloria asks Sebastian if he’d like to coach the factory’s archery team. Surprised but intrigued, he accepts. On his tour of the colossal assembly lines and housing complexes, Sebastian notices one building in particular, surrounded by razor wire, guarded by heavily armed men, a secure facility clearly off limits. In time he will learn that Liling works in this very building, but for now he—and we—can only wonder what goes on inside.

Briefing Chairman Yu, Gloria reveals that Sebastian’s father, John “Jack” Brandt, is the founding partner of a successful international contract law firm with offices and connections in Washington, D.C. She’s instructed to invite Sebastian to Jiaotong University, where the good Chairman will give an important speech, to ply Sebastian with favors, to engender his gratitude. After the speech in which Chairman Yu lays out China’s plan to create a multi-trillion-dollar trading empire, Sebastian is approached by Harry Parkes, who had seen him sitting in the VIP section along with Gloria and other dignitaries. Proffering his card with a wink and nod, Parkes invites Sebastian to join him for drinks back at the hotel. It is the first of many uninvited confidences in which Parkes attempts to win Sebastian over to his paranoid worldview.

Act Two

In the weeks that follow, Sebastian kindles a love of and respect for China’s civilisational culture, a slow-burning fire that pushes back gently but unapologetically against Western anti-China sentiment. With America’s global hegemony challenged, China’s unprecedented rise threatens to kick off a catastrophic war. Coupled with cameo appearances by leading Western scholars and diplomats John Mearsheimer, Kevin Rudd, Jeffrey Sachs, and Meg Rithmire, in which the myths of Chinese imperialism are debunked, Sebastian’s sympathies toward China coalesce. He wanders the streets of the ancient capital, watches school children run to greet their waiting parents at the end of the day, converses as best he can with local shopkeepers.

While attending the dedication of a new wing to his alma mater’s law library, Jack Brandt, his long-suffering alcoholic wife, Rose, in tow, learns that their only son has, suddenly and inexplicably, taken a medical leave of absence. In disbelief, he charges across campus to Sebastian’s dormitory, wresting from a terrified roommate the news that Sebastian has gone to China. Thus begins the family’s desperate search for their missing son, demanding help from the US consular office in Shanghai, querying every major hotel in every Chinese city, seeking answers to the senseless disappearance of a loved one.   

Now a regular at the factory coaching twice a week an enthusiastic cadre of toxophilites, Sebastian meets Liling’s closest friend, Min, a pretty, vain but sweetly innocent co-worker who dreams of marrying a K-pop star and living happily away from the drudgery of factory life. When he sees Min rehearsing a dance routine for the upcoming annual factory picnic, Sebastian is smitten. It was more than infatuation, more than desire, more even than love. It was beauty and truth embodied in a sixteen-year-old girl, tender, inescapable, radiant. Believing he has finally found his muse, he sets about sketching the lithe and sensual girl, her long braid and arching back resembling the taut string of an archer’s bow. Unsurprisingly, Liling is jealous at first, but when Min mysteriously disappears after the performance, presumed kidnapped by Gloria to join the delusional Chairman’s imperial harem, Liling puts her personal feelings aside out of concern for her friend’s fate.

The factory picnic marks the beginning of China’s Lunar New Year holidays in which half a billion people will travel vast distances to reunite with their families. Liling invites Sebastian to join her for the long journey north, to meet her parents and grandparents, to help with the chores, and to discover a precocious surprise—Liling’s four-year-old son, Pen-pen. We see through Sebastian’s eyes the rural idyll, hollowed out by migration, marked by hardship and deprivation. Only the very young and very old are left to depend for a better life on their parents’ and their children’s sacrifice.

Returning to find Min’s bunk stripped and her belongings gone, Liling hatches a plan to save her friend, if not in this life, then perhaps in another. She and Sebastian conspire to create a full-sized replica of Sebastian, bow in hand, a modern-day Kneeling Archer cast in resin. In order to explain how and why, she must first sneak her would-be accomplice disguised as a technician into the secure facility where she works. Sebastian is astonished by what he sees—dozens of workers in bunny suits, stainless steel tanks, computers, monitors, scanning booths, and a battery of huge 3D printers. Progressing further into the facility, more workers sand and assemble body parts, legs and torsos, arms and heads, some figures holding clipboards, others posed to solder or weld, still others pointing as if to map the intricacies of a blueprint. In yet another room the fully assembled, life-sized figures are meticulously painted to resemble the factory’s workforce: men and women, supervisors and fabricators, designers, engineers, accountants ready to discharge their duties—an army of resin warriors frozen in time.  

Confused by what he’s seen, uncertain and afraid, Sebastian balks. Liling decides to take him down to the bowels of the secret complex, to reveal its darkest secret so that he may behold with his own eyes the Chairman’s crazed necropolis. They descend several floors, avoiding detection, exiting into a half-lit antechamber with a massive vaulted door guarded by bronzed dragons. As they enter, Sebastian uses the light from his phone to illuminate one or two figures, their purpose beginning to dawn on him, or so he thinks, giggling at the folly of a storeroom full of dummies. When Liling finds and turns on the overhead lights, however, and a vast subterranean vault is illuminated, Sebastian gasps and falls silent as the enormity of thousands upon thousands of life-sized workers standing in formation in dust-laden shafts of light renders him awestruck.  

Act Three

Back at the factory, Liling learns from a co-worker that Chairman Yu has taken ill and that he may, in fact, be dying. This news gives urgency to her plan: emperors had the bad habit of burying their concubines alive, and Min would be no exception. Fearing discovery by his overbearing father and annoyed by the paranoid demands of Harry Parkes to spy on Chairman Yu’s “secret weapons’” lab, Sebastian moves to a small apartment near the factory, spending his days frantically painting on the walls the many images he had captured in his sketchbook. Liling sneaks Sebastian again into the complex to scan his body, generating a file used by the printers to produce his likeness in sections. But there is one ingredient missing, Liling tells him, one magical additive to the resin pool from which Sebastian’s figure will rise to ensure its inviolable nature—blood. Sebastian’s blood.

In the following days Liling visits Sebastian, drawing vial after vial of blood, pouring it surreptitiously into the resin vat from which his likeness emerges, feet and legs, torso, arms, and finally head. When the resin warrior has finished printing, Liling begins the assembly, carefully adhering each part before leaving it in line for the painters to animate and the staging hands to place in the vast subterranean hall. With each vial drawn Sebastian grows weaker, his arm bruised and withered, his energy ebbing away. Still, he works feverishly on his artwork, a man possessed, a raison d’être, until the entire apartment is covered in murals. In his impassioned torment, Sebastian recalls his visit to the warrior museum and the Kneeling Archer, who speaks to him across the sea of time.

In the closing scenes, Sebastian’s family is gathered in the consular offices in Shanghai, where Melissa Yun explains as sensitively as she can the process of repatriating Sebastian’s lifeless body. That scene dissolves into a nearly identical scene at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where the head of patient services, Cheryl Ward, discusses with the Brandts the decision either to have Sebastian interred or cremated. We realize what we may have suspected all along, that our hero never went to China, never met Gloria or Chairman Yu, Liling or Min. He never coached the factory’s archery team, though he could have. He was, sadly, the twelfth victim of the mass shooting in New York’s Chinatown. Like Christopher McCandless in Into The Wild, Sebastian’s journey ends in triumph and tragedy. He breaks free of the expectations of family and country to follow his heart. Death gives Sebastian’s life meaning and value, joy and love, and tragic grandeur. He travels inward, and there he finds salvation.  

By his hospital bed, somber and tearful, Rose strokes Sebastian’s hair as an Asian nurse disconnects an IV from the boy’s bruised and withered arm. Emotionless, Jack Brandt looks at the many sketches taped to the wall in his son’s room, stopping to stare with grim admiration at the fanciful image of a dancer, her arching back and flowing braid the drawn bow of his son’s dreams.  In an adjacent waiting room, a television airs newly released CCTV footage of the Chinatown shooting, showing Sebastian on his knees shielding a young girl as Harry Parkes fires indiscriminately into the crowded restaurant.

In the final scene we travel back to the factory’s vast subterranean hall, tracking row after row of resin workers in the ironic half-light of exit signs, ponderous, immobile, grappling with an incomprehensible truth, until finally we come to the figure of Sebastian Brandt, his bow incongruous, his vigil everlasting.

Backstory

For the better part of a century, the United States government has undertaken, overtly and covertly, the replacement of foreign governments in order to maintain and enlarge its sphere of influence. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Middle East, the U.S. government has shaped or installed foreign governments through the assassination of democratically elected leaders, the creation and empowerment of rebel forces, the illegal occupation of sovereign lands, and declarations of war. Arrogant and belligerent, American foreign policy has been utterly disastrous.

At the same time, internally the United States is in slow and inexorable decline. Its government is dysfunctional; its public is bitterly divided by cultural identities; its cities plagued by drugs and violence. Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat and scholar, believes America has in many ways “all the attributes of a failed state.” And those who reach for the easy answer—blaming China—are like a broken family that points the finger of blame at everyone but themselves.

The proliferation of anti-China messaging by Western politicians, pundits, and media outlets is symptomatic of its own disfunction, distorting and in some cases fabricating falsehoods, stoking fear, and deflecting attention away from its own issues and challenges. The Kneeling Archer seeks to shine a light on the extraordinary achievements of one, while holding a mirror up to the other that it might see in its reflection hypocrisy and false virtue.