BRICS film to focus on women
One of China’s most popular directors at Europe’s top movie festivals, Jia Zhangke, has again used his overseas influence to bring in foreign counterparts to work on an upcoming coproduction. The film, titled Half The Sky, is the second such film in a five-year project launched during the annual 2nd BRICS Film Festival in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, in June last year.
The project, based on President Xi Jinping’s proposal during the 8th BRICS summit in India in 2016, envisages one jointly-created film every year until 2021. Unlike the first movie, Where Has Time Gone? — in which Jia joined forces with four male directors respectively to shoot a short tale — Half The Sky has an all-female list of directors.
Liu Yulin represents China, and the remaining four female filmmakers are Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari from India; Elizaveta Stishova from Russia; Brazil’s Daniela Thomas and South Africa’s Sara Bleher.
Speaking about the project, Jia, who serves as the executive producer, says the decision to form an allwoman team was born at the Pingyao International Film Festival, an annual event launched by Jia in his hometown province of Shanxi, a place consistently depicted in his critically acclaimed films.
Explaining how the idea took root, he says: “We saw an interesting phenomenon there: three of the total four prizes were bagged by female directors, whose movies were very dynamic and creative. So we were thinking we can feature feminism as the theme of the second coproduction, and the idea received warm response from BRICS countries.”
The movie’s title is based on Chairman Mao Zedong’s statement in the 1950s: “Women hold up half the sky.”
Jia also says female directors have a good eye when it comes to capturing emotion and change.
The new movie will be an anthology like the first one, and will consists of five short stories — all about women -- each respectively directed by the five filmmakers.
Speaking about her story, Liu says it is titled The Dumpling, a traditional Chinese food symbolizing family reunion during Spring Festival, and adds that the 18-minute movie is about an estranged mother and daughter. But besides the dumplings, the story also features other Chinese elements.
The film was shot in seven days and features actresses Wang Luodan, Liu Bei and Zong Ping.
Giving details of how she picked the story for the film, she says: “When I was invited to take part in the coproduction, I looked for inspiration from what my friends and I have experienced.”
Liu, 31, first found fame with her Student Academy Award-winning Door God. And she grew more popular with Someone to Talk to, a critically acclaimed feature based on her father Liu Zhenyun’s Mao Dun Literature Prize-winning novel One Sentence Worth Ten Thousand. In the Russian story Catfishing, a woman in a rural area falls in love with a live broadcaster she meets on the internet.
And the Brazilian short, Back, tells of a woman’s journey to return to her hometown.
The South African story, The Measure of a Woman, centers on a female athlete’s fight against gender discrimination, while the Indian story, Taken for Granted, which features actress Sakshi Tanwar from
Dangal, the highest-grossing Indian movie in China, is a shorter version of the hit film.
Half the Sky will be released in China in this second half of this year, and will be distributed globally too.