Author | seamouse
With the disastrous rainstorm in Shanxi stopping, the Pingyao International Film Festival has spent its fifth year in a week of clear and dry weather. The collapse of a small part of the ancient city wall, the tight and uncertain rules of prevention and control, and the schedule that was issued on the eve of the screening, everything was carried out in a panic.
The young film festival, which is already like the old ancient city that accommodates its existence and development, needs to repair the exterior of the city wall and the interior of the house every year, and then turn the danger into a wave of new visitors. Even the fresh films it encouraged and funded, embracing individual self-expression and the traditional elements that the Seventh Art originally attracted audiences, such as last-minute rescues in feature films. In an academic event about Hitchcock and a detailed analysis of "Telephone Murder", Xu Ke made an analogy with Jia Zhangke, the founder of the film festival next to him, "There is a bomb hidden behind this screen, and no one at the scene knows about this situation." A cleaning lady collected the garbage and took it outside to throw it away, which turned the risk away, right? But for some reason, her superiors asked her to put her back in place first, and the situation became tense again. ”
Fortunately, the film festival, which opened as originally planned, did not have any more twists and turns. The participating films that take the road to the festival cannot have the thrilling appearance of Hitchcock's masterpiece. Without knowing the qualifications, taste tendencies and selection criteria of the two major competition units of Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon, I watched 20 of the 23 entries, trying to find out the commonalities and differences between them, and found a certain "Pingyao taste" from them.
<h3>The overall quality, the level of hidden dragons is uneven, and Crouching Tiger has its own characteristics</h3>
Compared with the audience and media reputation of the polarization controversy in previous years, this year's film festival seems that everyone has begun to have a more convergent taste for the entries. This is also like the local taste of Shanxi by outsiders, from the beginning of strange, unaccustomed and even unacceptable, and gradually overdone to habit, acceptance and even some likes.
In the "Sparrow Screening' Collection and Collation of 'Media Field Ratings', for the Hidden Dragon section of Chinese films, "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department" and "Yong'an Town Story Collection", received 3.8 and 3.7 equal scores far ahead of other works, and all of them gave praise of more than three stars (the highest four stars), and it was these two films that finally won the two major awards of the film festival (Fei Mu Honored Best Film and Best Director). The lowest score of only 0.4 points of "Thank You for Warming My World" is actually not a lot of scores, because too many people can't stand this "video" produced by Henan Newspaper Group, and left the scene early, and it is difficult to understand how the "TV movie" with such a low degree of completion was selected to the film exhibition with the most demanding first audience.
Of course, greens and turnips should always allow each to love. Some film and television practitioners are very puzzled by the high praise of "Yong'an Town Story Collection" and even greatly ignited, believing that the scorers have collectively received the red envelopes of the film party. After all, there is a sarcastic dialogue in the film critics industry (spoilers are involved here), "Some film critics, for 3,000 yuan, give five-star praise." "In the face of the overwhelming five-star tap water on the douban, if the producer really operates as said in the film, it is estimated that the family will have been ruined."
The 12 foreign language films in the Crouching Tiger unit will not have such a significant quality difference as the Chinese side. Most of these works from the non-main competition units of the three major European film festivals are far from being absolutely stunning, but they also have a stable finished film quality and their own unique artistic atmosphere, and let the film fans and travelers who are trapped in China during the epidemic era see some social faces in other countries over the years, as well as the changes in artistic expression on their respective soils.
<h3>Awarded for artistic exploration and display of local wonders</h3>
In the theater, the audience is accustomed to the story of the decline and ups and downs of the drama routine; at the film festival, fans are looking forward to the personality expression of brain holes and audiovisual innovation. The audience's word of mouth and the jury awards are also more consistent, giving these masterpieces with the spirit of experimental exploration, and even the "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department", which includes the three awards of the best film of the Fei Mu honor, the honor of the youth judge, and the honorary film of the fan film choice, from the title of the film, it declares, "I want to explore!" "The new director Kong Dashan, once had a famous network short film that can make people laugh to death, "The Future of the Legal System", telling the story of a film youth who indulged in self-expression, and after suffocating the audience in a literary and art film, he was arrested and arrested by the public security organs. This feature film debut proves that it not only has a strong story organization ability that is serious nonsense, but also can open up new possibilities for Chinese science fiction through pseudo-recording, under the powerful wings of meticulous logic and poetic romance. The wild laughter and sobbing of the audience is the biggest affirmation of this film.
Winner of the international film Award for Rossellini's Honor for Best Picture, Feathers, perhaps the most femalely awakened Arabic film, is set in the dusty quarries of Egypt, with a magical moment of great transformation at a birthday celebration, where the downcast and domineering man disappears and is replaced by a rooster with white feathers. A silent housewife who has never had any work experience, in order to find a husband and raise a baby, has to fight against life and the surrounding crowd, and finally "eats chicken" (here, spoilers in the name of the popular game).
The arabic electronic dance music in the dilapidated dormitories, the dusty police stations and hospitals, the black wizards who work with Coke bottles, "Feathers" inevitably has a display of some of the customs and wonders of Egyptian society, but not excessively. Among the shortlisted films in the two major units, we can also see some other local cultural wonders, the Turkish film "Hassan's Obligation", the famous director of the "Egg", "Milk", "Honey" trilogy Semich Kaplanoglu, but completely abandoned his previously skilled small and beautiful story, and instead had a Ceylonian ambition to dissect social humanity, which also showed in relative detail a series of behavioral and ideological preparations of the Muslim community for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In this way, the life situation of the little accomplished protagonist Hassan is set off, and after the intentional or unintentional use of neighbors and relatives, due to the delivery of hajj qualifications and the consequent, in the ensuing process of self-purification, guilt has arisen.
"The Legend of the Crab King", last year, when international travel was almost completely interrupted, sent the lead actor from Italy to Argentina, completing a two-part story in the northern and southern hemispheres, showing the closed and conservative villages around Rome at the end of the 19th century, such as "Happy Lazaro", but also showing the desolate moss wonders of Tierra del Fuego at the end of the world, as well as the legend of tibetan gold related to indigenous peoples and colonists. The national film "Blue Sky White Clouds" is a homecoming story from the Hunan factory dormitory to the Inner Mongolia grassland, with a romanticized display of pastoral logistics and small commodity trading, and in the wind and light letter throughout, there is also a spectacle that does not know whether to praise or deprecate, a very beautiful soundtrack and a very random use.
Natesh Hegde, an Indian film that won Rossellini's Honorary Best Director, is a vernacular film produced in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka and with dialogue in Kannada. The story takes place in an unknown village called Hegde's Kottalli, filled with a lot of taciturn time in the almost uninterrupted tropical rains from beginning to end. The electrician, who is the protagonist, is punished by the secret village rules and regulations for the small mistake of killing the livestock by mistake and the inexplicable personality distortion that follows.
Rossellini's specially praised Georgian film "What Do We See When We Look Up at the Sky?" It lasted 150 minutes, but it was almost a joyous 2.5 hours. This is an extremely wayward and personal work, but it is not indulged in self-expression at all, and even breaks the fourth wall to invite the audience to interact with the plot on the spot, similar to "Yong'an Town Story Collection", and also has a medium reflexiveness about the filming process. Director Alexander Koberize fictionalized a World Cup in which Messi led Argentina to win the World Cup, in order to expand the urban football geography shared by his hometown of Kutaisi people and dogs, and even climbed out of his musical fun, accompanied by community football matches, and broadcast the golden song "Italian Summer" from beginning to end. In the post-screening session recorded for the Pingyao Film Festival, he also explained the situation of his protagonist, which is not as described by the Popular Chinese Internet term "Lying Flat".
<h3>Looking for a son, nursing a daughter, oedipal, sick father, the family relationship of the film festival story </h3>
After watching most of the participating films, you will find that some single-dimensional family relationships in the protagonist's dilemma seem to have become the common theme of many film coincidences, of course, the film story has always been to sort out and refine people and interpersonal relationships, and the similar relationships that appear in the plots of different works are always inevitable. In general, this year's Pingyao film has the theme of finding a son, protecting a daughter, a mother,and a sick father.
The Colombian film Amparo is set in Medellín, the epicenter of the 1990s drug war, where a generation of drug lordSabol Pablo Escobar was killed, and government forces needed to capture zhuangding in the street gangsters who had just turned 18 and send them to fight in the still high-risk Amazon jungle. A poor mother named Amparo went to great lengths to get her son back from the military vehicle that was about to send troops. The shooting technique is a very current realist style, and the plot structure is a very traditional last-minute rescue. The Russian movie "Mom, I'm Back", also about the possible war trauma, does not believe that her mercenary son died on the battlefield in Syria, stubbornly wants to negotiate with the city government, which is busy repairing the holiday villas of high-ranking officials and waiting for the arrival of the number one person, but is sent by a powerful state administrative machine to send a KGB shell son, and in the process of forced to get along, gradually develop a strange reverse Stockholm complex.
As told by Netflix's high-profile drama "Narcos", when Latin America's long drug war entered the 21st century, the battlefield also shifted from Colombia to Mexico. Night of Fire is set in the alpine woodlands of central Mexico where poppies are abundant, where villagers harvest poppies for powerful cartel cartels while hiding from pesticides sprayed by the government air force. In this dangerous world, growing girls can be swept away by gang members at any time. Prepared for this, the mothers dug the tunnel early and organized their daughters into boy figures. The development of gender consciousness in the growth of girls, and the anxiety of mothers to protect their daughters, together promote the tense story, to the climax of the "night of fire".
The French-speaking Belgian film "A World of Children", in terms of theme and visual style, is one of the few outright realist works of this year's film festival (the other is the Serbian film "If You Can Walk") about refugee travel). The perspective comes from nora, a 7-year-old girl who has just entered school, in the long 70-minute film that is extremely friendly to the audience, in her own way and close-up close-up photographic language, dissecting the causes of school bullying and adult behavior around this global common problem, such as the father who transports her brothers and sisters to and from school, although he is eager to protect (children) and daughters, but he is helpless in the face of the institutional system.
The Philippine film "Typhoon Escape Plan" is more like a biblical story that the director interprets himself. There are husband-seeking women similar to the Egyptian movie "Feathers", and the Virgin Maiden who inexplicably lights up the miracle, and the protagonist who drives the narrative is a poor and pathetic mother, who has to face the problem of who to save first when his lover and mother fall into the water at the same time, but finally finds that no one in his escape plan needs to be saved by him.
"Goodbye, Paradise", which received special praise from Fei Mu, was selected for the second Pingyao Film Festival's developing project (W.I.P.), and three years later, director Wang Erzhuo made a strong self-expression of life private images, with a female self-description of the syllogism, acura hard work to walk through the life of the grandmother, dream but succumb to the mediocre mother, and the girl who drifted north, and even through watching the material and listening to the voice to really understand his mother. "Venus by the Water" is also a group of female portraits in southern Zhejiang, and like the above two parts, full of attachment to their mothers.
The father, either with the perseverance and ability of the protagonist (Zou Tao, who won the Fei Mu honor and best actor actor, played the Yangtze River boatman in "Day and Night River"), or with the image of the big tree in the eyes of the protagonist's son ("White Mansion", "Summer Time", "Street Baby"), appeared on the screen of Pingyao. Coincidentally, in the next three films, the fathers, who are important supporting characters, are seriously ill. The father of the Cambodian film "White Mansion", as the building director of the building about to be demolished, delayed the injured leg to the unfortunate moment when he was forced to amputate his leg, and the story itself has the common temperament hidden in Southeast Asian art films in recent years, or it is also infected by Apichatpong with the "tropical disease" of hot and cold before and half of the period. In "Summer Time", the father who guards the commissary, in the face of his son who is out in trouble, seems to be just a background board that does not pay attention to it, afraid of the scalpel of the folk small clinic, but he can always overcome the danger and live a smooth life.
The father of "Street Baby" is an old bastard who is about to die, following in the footsteps of the son of the street, almost wanting to run away, but he can't let go of this father who loves and kills with himself. At the same time, in this slap-in-the-face movie that may be more than a hundred times, there is also Huang Miyi, who won the Fei Mu honor and best actress, she is also the heroine of the first story of "Yong'an Town Story Collection", from this year's Cannes to Pingyao, double festivals and double films, will surely let her begin to attract a large number of independent productions. The same Sichuan-Chongqing dialect film, "Street Baby" jumped out at the end of an extremely exciting post-rocking song "I First", and the "waterway movie" "Day and Night River", which tells the history of the family from Nanchong to Suining and down the river, was unexpectedly accompanied by two original works from Cui Nan, a singer-songwriter who did not know where to go, and even wrote a Japanese song that made the audience think it was a Dongying folk song.
On the last day of the festival, in the Spring Cinema hall of the small town, the 39-minute short film "The Last Director of the Earth" starring Jia Zhangke and Ning Hao was screened. It was an expensive closing screening, with a minimum donation of 300 yuan per event ticket and no maximum limit, which was collected by the Pingyao County Red Cross Society for flood relief throughout the county. In the story, the film becomes a non-material heritage in the future, and the two former directors have a fierce debate over the place of non-hereditary heirs. In this thousand-year-old city on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list, the film that has been washed away by the impact of short videos will not be far away, like the ancient houses of the city walls that have been damaged by heavy rain, which need to be protected in the midst of controversy.