The movie "Where to Grow", released on August 31, is a movie focusing on the story of the original family.
18-year-old rebellious boy Cheng Fei (played by Yue Xiaoke) accidentally discovered a missing person notice at home about the missing female netizen "Swallowtail Butterfly" - He Sheng ( Shang Yuxian), and gradually discovered that his relationship with her is far more than just the Internet. Simple. Through the "pseudo-suspense perspective" of multiple timelines, the film shows the profound influence of the original family on personal growth and choices as the characters explore family secrets.
"Where to Grow" poster
Director Long Lingyun is born in the 1980s. He studied art since he was a child, and later studied drama in the UK. He has also worked in fashion magazines and advertisements for many years. Since he started trying to tell this story in 2014, he has spent ten years bringing a painful past about family and times, as well as the helpless and brave choices of individuals in it, to the audience. Before the film was released, Long Lingyun accepted an exclusive interview with reporters from The Paper and talked about his film and the world he observed, and the process of "growing up".
"Where to Grow" director Long Lingyun
stirred up ripples in history with a small family
In 2015, China officially opened the two-child policy. The only child who once carried all the expectations and pressure of his parents has become a generation with the memory of a generation. history. This had a huge impact on Long Lingyun, who was studying film at the Beijing Film Academy at the time. As a post-80s generation who was born and raised under the one-child policy, Long Lingyun’s perception of family is that it is “natural” for a family to have only one child. But suddenly one day, this naturalness suddenly disappeared. "I felt at that time that the history and feelings of this generation for more than 30 years needed to be discussed."
The inspiration for "Where to Grow" came from Long Lingyun, a former The experiences of depressed female friends. While chatting with his friend, he learned that the shackles his friend could not break free from came from his family. When she was a child, her father divorced her mother in order to have a chance to have another son. The father gave birth to a daughter again, and his obsession with having a son caused indelible damage to the original and subsequent new families. The mother who was stabbed turned her disappointment in her husband into extreme love and control over her daughter. The high pressure made her friend unable to breathe, and her empathy and understanding for her mother made her unable to bear to resist.
Stills from "Where to Grow"
Long Lingyun was shocked by his friend's experience, and it also made him truly realize for the first time that this phenomenon did not only exist in rural or remote poverty-stricken areas as he thought. Because he grew up in Chengdu, he was more accustomed to seeing strong women in the southwest. The rumors of Sichuan men being "ear-throwing" and "hep-afraid" made Long Lingyun a little slow to perceive the plight of women. However, his friend's experience made him feel the plight of women for the first time. Once I realized that the issue of "preferring boys over girls" turned out to be very close to me. After that, Long Lingyun began to systematically study related content and read many books related to feminism and sociology. "In the process, I felt more and more that this story needed to be told."
After obtaining his friend's consent, he decided to tell the story It was filmed, but based on his own gender perspective and imagination, the father in the story got a son as he wished. "I imagine, if this younger brother suddenly knew one day that he had a sister he had never met, and that he was born just because his father wanted a boy, how would he view this matter."
In real life, he does not have the courage to face this. The sisters who meet each other become brothers and sisters who "snoop" on each other in the film. In the film, the gender issue is gradually revealed in a hidden suspense through the confusing background of the characters. Long Lingyun combines the gender identity crisis of this generation with family conflicts, trying to present a complex and real social picture. Narratively, the boy follows the mysterious girl "Swallowtail Butterfly" who disappears, and gradually uncovers the life of the previous generation. The non-linear narrative method revisits and examines the growth and historical background of the characters like a puzzle.
This kind of perspective allows the eyes of the young people in the movie to achieve the "viewing" of their parents as the children's generation.In the film, Alia plays the mother He Xiuqing. Under the suffocating sense of oppression, there is hidden the suffering and helplessness of another era. Long Lingyun, who grew up in a divorced family, began to try to understand his parents' choices and behaviors from a broader historical background as he grew older.
Stills from "Where to Grow"
In "Where to Grow", the mother He Xiuqing, as a former educated youth, left her hometown in adolescence, experienced hard labor, and was quickly pushed into marriage and family. Her personal dreams and emotional needs are suppressed, and all expectations and pressures are instead transferred to the next generation. "Many people face problems that are not just personal, but the product of the entire social structure and historical context in which they live." Their trajectories are often passively affected by society and policies. This historical inertia makes their lives lack autonomy. "
In the film, He Xiuqing once sang a song that was widely circulated during the period of going to the mountains and rural areas. "Song of the Educated Youth". Long Lingyun told reporters the story behind it. It was a song composed by educated youths from Nanjing who were sent to Yunnan. The song expresses the deep longing of the educated youth for their hometown. It spreads throughout the country by word of mouth, and the educated youth in each place will fill in different versions of the lyrics according to the characteristics of their hometown. Later, the author of this song was imprisoned because the song was played on Soviet radio. After being released from prison, he returned to Nanjing and established a small educated youth museum to preserve this period of history in the memory of the world.
Long Lingyun's mother was also an educated youth. Long Lingyun decided to use this song in the movie after her mother recommended it. When he went to Nanjing to visit the author and inquired about paying the copyright fee, the author refused because, in his opinion, "This song does not belong to me, it belongs to all educated youths."
It is also because of this sentence that the scene where the song is sung is given a more profound meaning in the movie. He hopes that the audience can pass these Details build up the understanding and imagination of the previous generation, "I know that I am not capable of making that kind of grand narrative. I want to enter from the perspective of a small family, but let people see that there is a history behind it." "
"Where to Grow" poster
Comic books, DVDs nourish the creative starting point and ten years of film career
Looking back on his childhood, in Long Lingyun's memory, his parents were busy with work, and he was always neck-deep. With a bunch of keys hanging on his head, he goes to and from school alone, and does his homework alone. "The loneliness is deep in the bones." Because there are no other children at home to play with, he has a lot of free time to read, including many " "Super Program" ideological books made him start to think about grand issues such as the composition of the world and the meaning of life. He still remembered that when he was a child, he liked to play a game with himself, which was to close his eyes and then quickly open them. "I always thought that the world might be made up of certain particles. When I close my eyes, it will shatter and collapse; if I try to open my eyes fast enough, I can see the process of its reorganization."
After his parents divorced, Long Lingyun had more pocket money at his disposal. A large number of comic books became his spiritual food in adolescence. As you grow up, you have to make more and more decisions yourself. Recalling that after he was admitted to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he went to the UK to study drama, and then returned to China to work on magazines, shoot advertisements, and make movies, Long Lingyun looked back and calculated his motivations for embarking on the path of a creator, "Probably because he was too lonely when he was a child."
"Where to Grow" stills
Long Lingyun's movie dream began in 2014. During those years of working in fashion-related fields, he always harbored a dream of making movies. During the years when Chinese films were booming, he felt the film industry's tolerance and expectations for young directors, and many non-professional directors began to have the opportunity to shoot and release their works. So he quit his job in Shanghai, moved to Beijing, and entered the Literature Department of Beijing Film Academy to study screenwriting.
The prototype of the story "Where to Grow" was written during the training class. Although the first draft was very different from the final film, it laid the basic framework and theme of the film.In 2015, Long Lingyun took the script to participate in the Wu Tianming Film Fund's "Light of the Master" advanced workshop for young screenwriters, met like-minded producer Liu Lei, and began to jointly promote the short film into a feature film. Under Liu Lei's "supervision", they caught up with the first venture capital training camp launched by the Shanghai International Film Festival. Compared with previous venture capital investments, the training camp did not require a complete script, only an outline. This is the first time that the project "Where to Grow" has been recognized in the industry. After arriving at the training camp, "I began to truly understand the complete production process of a movie."
In 2019, "Green Onion Project" was shortlisted for "Green Onion Project" and eventually entered the top five of "Green Onion Project". As a support platform for young filmmakers of the Directors Guild, most of the projects of Green Onion Project can get the support of top creators in the industry and be put into theaters with excellent production. "Where to Grow" has also been favored by large companies in the industry. At the end of 2019, Long Lingyun waited with great ambition for the project to finally start filming after the New Year. As a result, once the New Year passed, the film industry and the lives of people around the world all changed.
Affected by the epidemic, many film projects have been postponed or canceled. At the end of 2020, Long Lingyun and his partners decided to lower the budget and scale of production, and start filming anyway. "I'm very glad that the producer pushed me to make this wise decision. Some of the artistic film projects I knew about during the same period were later suspended."
The opening photo of "Where to Grow"
I studied art since I was a child and worked in fashion. Long Lingyun’s experience gave Long Lingyun a natural awareness of the visual presentation of movies, whether it was carefully arranging the colors of scenes and characters’ costumes to show the personality and status of the characters, or shooting indoor spaces with anamorphic wide-screen lenses to bring a sense of oppression. The contrast between placing the character in a "squeezed" environment and the hand-held lens in the outdoor space to express the turmoil of the character is all years of artistic training, which has brought about the ease of constructing narrative space. In the
movie, sister He Sheng, who is transformed into a "Swallowtail Butterfly", wears a bright orange-red wig, paying tribute to classic movies such as "Lola Run" and "The Fifth Element". In the youth of director Long Lingyun, films directed by Shunji Iwai, Wong Kar-Wai, Luc Besson and other directors were his film enlightenment.
Stills from "Where to Grow"
Since high school, Long Lingyun frequently visited a DVD store near his home. The owner claimed to have the most comprehensive movie resources within a three to five kilometers radius. "I go there two or three times a week, and I rent three or five movies every time I go. I watch whatever the boss recommends. It can be said that the early movie aesthetics were laid down for me by the owner of the video store," he joked.
The small video store became his utopia. In his movie, he played a guest role as the owner of a DVD store, which in a disguised way satisfied his "obsession" when he was young. The film is overflowing with cinephilia elements. On the one hand, he hides his little pleasure in paying tribute to his beloved movies. On the other hand, he also feels that the cultural and entertainment atmosphere of the early 21st century that it exudes is just in line with the era in which the story takes place.
Long Lingyun made a cameo appearance in the film as the owner of a DVD store.
What makes Long Lingyun a little regretful is that he is inevitably immature as a first-time director, so he chose a non-linear narrative method. However, due to his ability, it was not "silky" enough. He admitted that this structure enhanced the suspense and appeal of the story, but also created problems with emotional coherence. In addition, due to the pressure to "reduced shooting" to start the production, the entire creative team was almost made up of "junior players" who called on friends to help. Many mistakes were made during the shooting, so much so that when it came to the editing stage, nearly half of the material was missing. Because of various "technical reasons", I showed my timidity and didn't use it.
Stills from "Where to Grow"
The creation of a newborn calf always has its own unique vigor and passion. In the film, the director designed a "water house" for his sister. The damp smell of leaking water symbolizes the mother's nourishment and suffocating love. Correspondingly, my younger brother has a "fire house" scene design. Long Lingyun hopes to use fire to ignite the character's inner rebellion and awakening. But at that time, due to financial constraints and the failure to find a suitable venue, the producers decided to cut this laborious and expensive scene.But the art director saw that the director was not willing to give in, and proposed a method of "crowdfunding" ignition tickets. Each "fire ticket" cost 500 yuan. 10 people participated in the crowdfunding. Everyone found an abandoned swimming pool and completed the filming. People who purchased "fire tickets" held torches on the day of filming to add firewood to the filming scene. "
The director and producer
who bought the "Ignition Ticket" to shoot "Ye Luzi" has been stumbling along the way. It has been ten years since the prototype of the script. In 2022, the film premiered at the Xining First Youth Film Festival and won the Best Actor and Audience Choice Honors; the following year, it was specially mentioned by the jury in the Focus on the Future section of the Beijing International Film Festival.
Due to the small size of the film and its literary subject matter, it was once difficult to find a distribution company and the film's literary and artistic attributes were placed on it. In today's not-so-warm market, the challenges are even greater. Long Lingyun admitted that he was no longer obsessed with the release of the movie, but now that he has the opportunity to let the movie see the audience, he is ready. " I have always felt that the 'toxic' parent-child relationship, the trauma of the original family, and the preference for sons over daughters should be discussed more. "
In the past two years, "Where to Grow" has been featured in many film festivals. Some people came to him after watching the movie and cried bitterly when recounting their past experiences. Others questioned the issue of "preferring boys over girls" in the filming. Does it seem a bit outdated and "fashionable" now? "I started working on this story because I loved these characters and was attracted by the tension in their relationships. "
" Rather than being called "tacky", I still think it is still necessary to discuss these issues. I wish more people would create stuff like this, rather than stop doing it because of the dissatisfaction they might cause. Some things are still happening and it is too early to say they are outdated. "
