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"Loach is Fish Too" at Tokyo International Film Festival
(tiff-jp.net)
Updated: 2005-10-30 16:27
The fifth day of TIFF presented the World Premiere screening of the new
Chinese work Loach is Fish Too and the director Yang Ya-zhou and stars Ni Ping
and Ni Da-hong answered questions at a press conference.
The film is a potent look at a struggling woman from the countryside named
Loach (Ni Ping) raising two young daughters who come to the Beijing to earn
money. On train she is accosted by a man whom she rebuffs. Once in the big city,
though, she has to deal with the same man as he is a foreman at the place she
finds work. It turns out his name is also Loach (Ni Da-hong) and the pairs' fate
seems to be intertwined.
The film does a superb job of depicting the difficult life of workers that
have flooded into the capital to find employment, with many scenes of the
drudgery and camaraderie among laborers presented. The director explained "In
this film we shot a lot of scenes on construction sites and all the extras were
actually migrant workers in Beijing."
This emphasis on the reality of poor laborers, along with the relationship
between the two Loaches, is one of the major themes of the film. Yang related
the reasons for this focus.
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