Honest fiction
Li Yang, 48, seeks to express his reflections on society and humanity in his films. Jiang Dong |
Li explained he was a director doing research for his film Blind Shaft (Mang Jing), but nobody believed him. In the end, he had to capitalize on his personal friendships with local officials to escape.
That was in 2002. In the following two years, Blind Shaft garnished 12 prizes and six nominations in international film festivals, including a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement - an award not bestowed for 15 years by Berlin Festival judges.
In the film, two coalminers murder their colleagues deep in a mineshaft. They make the deaths appear like accidents and extort the mine owners by claiming they are relatives of the deceased. But when one of them gradually develops an emotional attachment for their next target - a naive 16-year-old boy - a dramatic twist of plot becomes inevitable.
A scene from Blind Shaft directed by Li Yang. File photo |
"Intellectuals are born to express their reflections on society and humanity," he says. "What I wanted to question after reading the story was: Can life be measured by money in a society undergoing great changes?"
The 48-year-old had shot three documentaries by then - one about the Nanjing Massacre and two about the rituals of Chinese ethnic minority groups - and he wanted to know whether he could do features as well.
He took only 15 days to complete the script. Then, working with a journalist friend who had covered coalmine accidents, he spent four months doing first-hand research, visiting small private mines in Shanxi, Henan and Anhui provinces.
He ate and sometimes lived with the miners, whose harsh lives and positive attitudes made him realize how pale and stereotyped his original script was.
The dormitory of these miners, Li recalls, was just a place to sleep. All of the quilts were black with coal dust and encrusted with patches of mildew. So many of these miners worked with their lives at stake everyday, just so their children could continue schooling and have better lives than they had. They seldom complained, but rather, ate happily when food was prepared, drank wine when they liked, told dirty jokes and laughed loudly.
After taking these tours, Li revised the script and began the 30-hour filming period deep in a mineshaft, funding the project with his own savings and some borrowed money.
During this time, he had to live under a shabby laneway with a roof propped up by wood rather than steel. It was just like what the miners he met had jokingly told him - a piece of flesh between two pieces of stone.
From time to time during the filming, chunks of coal would fall on Li and his sound engineer. Two hours after they left the shaft, it collapsed entirely.
Li is opposed to explaining and preaching. That could be why the New York Times said "the movie is chillingly lacking in frills".
Instead, Li explained that he did not want to probe into the morals behind the stories. Rather, he hoped to candidly show what happened and let the audience reflect upon what they've seen and develop their own conclusions.
Few would believe the director had spent 14 years abroad upon seeing the appearance of the dilapidated mine complex. As early as 1987, Li, then a student at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute (today's Communication University of China), got a chance to study in Germany. German films' self-criticism and traditional reflections on history, society and humanity came to influence his scriptwriting and filming.
Xenia Shin, of Asia Pacific Arts Magazine, said that Blind Shaft is an uncompromising film that explores evil and innocence in the depths of the earth, where life both literally and figuratively maintains its tenuous balance upon a fulcrum.
The film failed to hit China's theaters, though, because Li did not send the script to the national film bureau before filming. Li said he had just returned from Germany then and did not know enough about the Chinese system.
He always thought it was a pity, so when he was preparing to film Blind Mountain (Mang Shan) in 2006, he actively negotiated with the bureau and came to an understanding about the storyline before filming began.
Blind Mountain deals with women who were kidnapped and sold into marriage. Official statistics show that from 1991 to 1995, a total of 80,555 of kidnapped and sold women were saved in China. Many of them were sold to impoverished areas where young men had difficulty finding wives.
Li spent one month in Southwest China's Sichuan Province's towns of Jintang and Zhongjiang, where many rescued women lived. With his sincerity, he uncovered many first-hand stories from these women. And to each of these women, he would provide some money as compensation.
When the film screened in this year's Cannes Festival, many foreign journalists asked Li whether such kidnapping took place nowadays. Li emphasized that the time setting was in early 1990s, before the agricultural tax was abolished and compulsory education in rural areas was not as common as today. These factors contributed to the kidnappings, but today, things are getting much better.
He says he chose the story not to show how rampant the crime was; the focus, rather, was on asking why nobody helped the heroine when she tried to flee.
"How can man be so indifferent to others' sufferings? This is what I want to question most through the film," he says. "I can never imagine I would just watch such violence take place in front of me."
Li's father, once a famed actor, told him to be an upright man since he was very young. Although his father died in the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) when he was only 13, a belief in integrity has become the compass of his life.
"A society needs critics. Only because of critics would people feel any sense of shame," he says.
Hoping to reach a wider audience, Li is trying to screen Mountain this year. "Film is like a bistoury," he says. "When a society rankles, it cuts the flesh open, to show people the inflammation and make them think about why it happens."
(China Daily 07/17/2007 page20)
