Source: Global Times
From Beijing to Nice, when Lucy, a 12-year-old Chinese girl, goes to France with her parents to settle down, what will happen to her family? After the novel "Tiger Meat" launched by the French publishing house Anna Carriel in early March, it attracted the attention of the French media and readers. French director Mai Zuodan chose Chinese family relations as the narrative theme of his literary "debut", allowing people to see the unique perspective of the French literary and art circles to tell the chinese parent-child relationship.
In Lucy, who loves French and Chinese tradition, the reader can see beautiful poetry and metaphors. However, as an "outsider", Lucy has to face bullying in school, and Lucy's mother is determined to help her daughter who is threatened with death to fight. In an interview with Radio France Internationale, Mai Zuodan said that the novel tells the process of mother's awakening through the perspective of his daughter Lucy. Prior to "Tiger Meat", Mai Zuodan had filmed another film about the relationship between mother and child in 2015, "Journey to China". In the film, the well-known French actress Youlanda Monroe plays the mother, who came to China alone to take home her son's body after receiving the bad news of the accidental death of her son who was far away in China. The mother retraced her son's footsteps in a completely unfamiliar country, and unconsciously felt her son's emotions and life breath. The journey of grief gradually becomes a precious experience, and the mother reinvents herself in the process. The film scored 7.1 points on the Douban website, and many Chinese audiences believe that "the film touches the simple part of the Chinese bottom, how the French mother's heart is integrated into the Chinese view of death is the focus of the film."
The French literary and art circles have long been concerned about China's family relationship. In the 1980s, in the Sino-French co-production film "Boudoir Love" directed by Doveman, Qin Li, a daughter with pianist dreams, had to make a compromise because of her father's "arranged" marriage. Years later, Qin Li became a female pianist living in Paris, and at the beginning of her concert, she found her father, whom she had not met for a long time, come to the scene of the performance... The film's original autobiographical novel,"Tears of the Flower Car," was highly recommended by Madame de Gaulle. Specifically, the interest of the French literary and art circles in China's kinship relationship is first manifested in their attention to Chinese films that tell such subjects. Many French audiences believe that works such as "Alive", "Eating Men and Women", and "Long Days on Earth" have both literary and artistic beauty, "after being moved, people seriously examine and compare the value bases of Chinese and Western families". Based on the concern and reflection on China's family relationship, The French director Maitreya, who directed "Butterfly", created the Chinese family relationship film "Nightingale" in 2014 that connects the relationship between three generations of grandchildren. A French director, with his understanding and expression skills of Chinese-style family affection, warmed the Chinese and French audiences with an ordinary Chinese family story. Nightingale (right) also represented Chinese mainland in the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
For the novel "Tiger Meat", which once again explores China's kinship relationship, the French media commented that the gripping story "should soon be put on the screen". Mr. McZodan said his father was Jewish of Hungarian descent who grew up in Argentina and that his family members often spoke Greek, Italian and Spanish. He grew up with a keen interest in Oriental culture and language, and he vividly remembers being drawn to posters by Singapore Airlines at the airport and telling his parents to "grow up to go to Asia". Mai Zuodan said that he found his childhood memories of living in a foreign country in Lucy, the protagonist of "Tiger Meat", "although I have no children, I feel childish, and choosing parent-child themes in filming and writing novels may also be trying to make up for the regret of not being a father."
In the view of Maitreya, the director of "Nightingale", the choice to shoot Chinese-themed films has its particularities, and China has undergone great changes in a short period of time, and the difference between urban and rural areas is very large. The excessively fast pace of life makes Chinese busy, as if the heart is "dead" (the busy word consists of "heart + death"). "I wanted to explore through film the 'meaning of human life' – whether to just chase money and fame, or to find something spiritual and moral, and how to find a balance between the two." Despite the effort required to make Chinese films, Maitreya has begun to conceive of his next Chinese production: a film about the experiences of Chinese workers in France during World War I.