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Craig Wallace’s Telégin, known as “Waffles” for his pockmarked skin, is an amiable fumbler yet suffused with kindness and possessing an implacable decency.

“I was interested in the bittersweet, funeral quality that suffuses Tsai’s film,” Lund says.

Just as Allfrey’s photographs were “crowded with lifetimes,” so is Russell’s novel, a work suffused with the “mystery of kindness” and the banality of violence.

But to watch “The Annihilation of Fish” now, 26 years after its debut, that frustrating backstory only adds extra poignancy to a picture already suffused with it.

His dialogue was abundant and suffused with paradox and irony.