On Women's Day, March 8, 2024, the nationwide release of the movie "Gong Xiu" attracted much attention.
This film, which won the Best Screenplay Award at the 70th San Sebastian International Film Festival and the Best Actress Award at the 18th Eurasian International Film Festival, focuses on the economics of a female worker in the changing times. The reflections it brings us about self-improvement and spiritual self-reliance are still very precious today.
Jiupai News invited Wang Chao, the director of "Kong Xiu", to talk about the stories inside and outside the movie. Let us follow his lens and focus on the life-long sacrifices, joys and sorrows of millions of Chinese industrial female workers.
guest speaker丨Director Wang Chao is one of the representatives of China's sixth generation of film directors. He has directed films such as "Anyang Baby " and "Summer in Jiangcheng", and won many international awards such as "Un Certain Regard" Best Film at Cannes.
Talker丨Nine Pai News Commentator Wen Hedao
Nine Pai News:
Before you paid more attention to modern and contemporary themes, "Kong Xiu" is your first period drama, focusing on a longer time span. theme. What considerations led you to focus on a particular piece of history?
Wang Chao:
I believe that the parents in front of the screen must have experienced this period of life from the 1960s to the 1980s like me. If you want to know about your parents' youthful years and have a deep understanding of the path they took at that time, their hardships, their love, their work, their efforts and struggles, (watching "Kong Show") will be very interesting. Friendly and able to have a sense of belonging.
What kind of literary works your parents liked when they were young, what kind of pop songs they liked to listen to, and how they danced and fell in love. All these details are shown in this movie. Actor Shen Shiyu and the other three (main) actors are all born in the 80s and 90s, and are actually about the same age as you. Even though they are young people, they worked very hard and excelled when they played their parents. This is a very interesting time travel.
Jiupai News:
Many people actually have some inherent impressions of the style of that era. They may understand it more through expressions such as scar literature and so on. The perspective you choose and the temperament you present in your creation are different from this. What new things do you want to express?
Wang Chao:
Our play actually fills a gap - some other people in that era and their real lives. In this movie, I also try to express the optimistic, progressive, and enterprising spirit of that era, with a spirit of its own that was not afraid of difficulties and did not bow to fate. These were also very real in that era.
The origin of this movie is not fiction, it comes from a real woman. A worker writer in the 1980s, she wrote a memoir, which is a living symbol of the spiritual spirit of a generation of women who have passed through that era.
I hope this movie can start a conversation with contemporary women. It can connect different genders and generations to have a conversation. You can see the shadows of your parents and grandmothers in the movie, and we are derived from our own parents. We finally have a chance to get to know our parents when we are in our twenties and thirties, when we are about to fall in love and start a family. This is a very important thing.
Kong Xiu provides us with an opportunity to understand our parents, pay tribute to them, for their efforts in that era, their contributions to the country, and the price they paid for us through hard work.
Jiupai News:
Many film and television works portray the lives of ordinary female workers like Kong Xiu in a vague or even rigid way. How do you grasp the psychology and life mood of the protagonist Kong Xiu?
Wang Chao: The source of everything
is still the original work by teacher Zhang Xiuzhen. It was during that era that through struggle, she got rid of the shackles of two failed marriages from a female worker to a writer, which means she overcame many difficulties.The experience of pulling your own child is very exciting and enough to attract the audience.
The original work decided that it is a drama with a female protagonist, so what is a drama with a female protagonist? Our movie almost runs through half of the heroine’s life experience. A drama with a leading heroine would not be what it is today if it did not have a good script and a good heroine to complete it brilliantly. All of this, the solid original work, the excellent script, and the outstanding performance of our entire team, especially the heroine Shen Shiyu, made this drama with a heroine particularly good.
Jiupai News:
You just used the term heroine. Although this concept did not exist at that time, there were actually quite a lot of female workers like Kong Xiu who were particularly tough and had their own inner strength.
Kong Xiu’s status as a worker gave her the confidence to fight when faced with many difficulties. Participating in social productive labor is also a prerequisite for women's liberation. What do you think of the new challenges that women may face in today's perhaps more complex work and living environment?
Wang Chao:
In fact, the difficulties Kong Xiu encountered are the same among women today.
In a movie about the past era, I portrayed a particularly strong woman. In every setback and every difficulty, she will know what she wants and what her backbone is, and she will not compromise easily. I hope that women like Kong Xiu can give contemporary women some encouragement and comfort.
Kong Xiu is a female worker, and ("Kong Xiu") is a workers' movie. In fact, I also want to dedicate this movie to all workers and female workers. This is not only a film made for Kong Xiu, but also a film made for tens of millions of industrial workers in China and tens of millions of female industrial workers. In addition to hard work, female workers also have to take care of their families and raise children. Especially in such a life, they still do not forget that they are people who demand progress.
For the thousands of industrial workers who are silent, I also hope that by watching this movie, everyone will have a chance to talk, a chance to empathize with each other, and to generate love and strength between each other.
Jiupai News:
"Kong Xiu" focuses on factory workers with very humanistic care. Let's continue our conversation from this topic. Starting from your first work "Anyang Baby", your creations have always paid great attention to realistic expression. What do you think of the current status of domestic realist film creation?
Wang Chao:
We happened to have just finished the New Year. During the New Year, we saw a lot of entertainment movies, a lot of particularly happy movies. In addition, I hope everyone will not forget that in addition to the function of entertainment, movies can also make us think, get closer to each other emotionally, and understand ourselves and the era we live in.
Such opportunities used to come from reading books, but now we are really tired of reading books. We also need a chance to calm down, think and review our lives, to feel and sympathize with our friends and the weak around us.
A movie like Kong Xiu is not one of those obscure or dull movies. It is not. It still talks about us ordinary people, our own families, ordinary working-class families, your neighbors, our uncle downstairs, his youthful years, our parents, and our aunts. Uncle, tell us about our past.
We drank a lot of thick soup, so we can drink a cup of tea like this.
Jiupai News:
Your expression is very close to life and very simple. Many movies that are also labeled as realism use different expression methods. How do you choose?
Wang Chao:
I come from a working-class family. My parents are both workers. Before I went to film school, I worked as a worker for five or six years. My movies will naturally focus on my class. This is a very broad class that exists in every corner of society. Although they are ordinary, they are very worthy of respect.We must always have a place where, through an artistic expression, we can see those vast numbers of lives that work silently but deserve respect, their joys, sorrows, and joys, and their dignity.
My lens is focused on these silent majority. In the past, the techniques I used were too artistic and used some long lenses, but this time it was completely different. "Kong Xiu" was very vivid. I express it in film language that people can understand. There is a good foundation in the script writing stage, and some very vivid lines come from every small but important role. Young people who have watched the movie also feel very close to it and volunteered to take their parents to watch it. They completely understood it. "Kong Xiu" uses a very easy-to-understand method to seriously face us ordinary people.
Jiupai News:
Thank you very much for your consistent creation and leading us to see this group.
You have mentioned your understanding of film philosophy many times. For example, you have talked about Deleuze. Can you talk about the influence of these philosophical theories on your creative ideas in the light of Kong Xiu?
Wang Chao:
People like Deleuze and others I have talked about, including all our postmodern philosophy, are all derived from the Dionysian spirit of Nietzsche, and the Dionysian spirit is the most popular spirit. If it turns out that artists need threshold, then in modern philosophy and modern art, everyone is an artist. Now in the short video era, everyone is a director. Deleuze has a concept of the so-called tuber. We see that the root of a plant is filled with countless stems. He is considered the prophet of the Internet age, having predicted it in the 1970s. Beneath the earth's surface, we are countless connected stems, and our souls are one.
[Source: Jiupai News]
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