The upcoming documentary film "Moments on Ice," which will be released on January 7, is another teenage documentary by young director Liu Hanxiang. Talking about this work with a shooting cycle of up to three years, Liu Hanxiang said that at first there was no purpose, until half a year later, he slowly understood what he wanted to shoot. Liu Hanxiang said that the documentary is a game with time, or it can be said that it is betting and playing against time, "It is the flower of time, and all we can do is wait." ”
The documentary film "Moments on Ice" will be released nationwide on January 7.
Although this is a documentary film on sports themes, Liu Hanxiang hopes to present the current family education and the delicate relationship between father and son, mother and son through these three children playing hockey and the family behind them.
First, talk about creation
After shooting for half a year, I realized what I really wanted
Before filming "Ice Moments", director Liu Hanxiang had never touched the sport of ice hockey at all. "I didn't deliberately make this film, I first entered the team with Qu Ruichen and his mother, and they were the first targets I locked in." Liu Hanxiang said that There was something infecting qu Ruichen on his body, and this child had a little rebellion and a little badness, but it was very cute.
Qu Ruichen is the first object of "Ice Moment".
During filming, Yu Lifan and his father, who were also on the ice hockey team, appeared. After a game, Yu Lifan's father was criticizing him very harshly, and Liu Hanxiang stood aside and silently filmed, "I was worried at the beginning that his father would scold me, and after communicating with him, he said you want to shoot it." ”
In this way, Liu Hanxiang and his team followed five or six families in succession, silently recording their daily lives. Liu Hanxiang combed and edited while shooting, but he was still not quite sure what he wanted to shoot. Almost half a year later, Zhai Zinan, a young boy who followed the film, decided to go to Canada to learn ice hockey. It was also at this time that Liu Hanxiang suddenly realized what he was going to shoot.
Today, Zhai Zinan is still studying ice hockey in Canada.
"The trajectory of their lives has changed because of ice hockey, some people choose to go abroad, some people choose to stay, which can constitute a story." With such a big framework, Liu Hanxiang began to construct the story behind.
In Liu Hanxiang's view, making a documentary has to face many possibilities, don't lock the target as soon as you come up, it will lose a lot of things, "I don't have a script, the script is naturally grown, all I can do is to shoot and capture." ”
He spent three years documenting the three children and their families' daily lives. For three years, in the face of the subject's daily training day after day, Liu Hanxiang said that there were times of exhaustion, but he could only insist. "Everyone wants to shoot conflicts, shoot really big moves, so that there is a story, but life is not like this." 」 Liu Hanxiang to face the daily trivialities, to face the fragmentation of life, he wants to use the lens to record one by one, from which to discover those pearl-like shining points, "to make a documentary is to bet with time, to game with time, it is the flower of time." It's not that we want any result, we will give me what result, the only thing that gives you the result in the end is time, all we can do is wait. ”
2. Talk about family education
For three years, the relationship between parents and children has always changed
"Ice Moment" is not only a documentary film depicting the current state of ice hockey, but also the family education, father-son and mother-child relationships presented in the film are also thought-provoking. After more than two years of shooting and getting along, Liu Hanxiang has also been inspired by it, and the subtle changes in it have fascinated him.
Liu Hanxiang said that he first made this film not because of ice hockey, but to see how these children grow up and how parents educate their children, "I started making this film out of curiosity about education. ”
In Liu Hanxiang's view, the concept of family education is not absolutely correct or not, only whether it is suitable or not, as a father, this is a problem he has been thinking about. In the past three years, watching the changes in the relationship between Qu Ruichen, Zhai Zinan and Yu Lifan, the three children and their parents, his thoughts have also changed.
Yu Lifan in training.
Many viewers believe that Yu Lifan's father is too strict with his children's education methods, and Liu Hanxiang did not understand it at first, but over time, he found that things were not as simple as they seemed. Yu Lifan's father's education method is closely related to the way father and son get along for many years and the difference in personality, "Take the practice of ice hockey, Yu Lifan's father knows that harmony and whispering cannot solve the problem." This is the 'tacit understanding' formed by their father and son for so many years, and it is also caused by inertia. ”
The same is true of Qu Ruichen's relationship with his mother. Because his father was often absent from home, his mother was tortured by Qu Ruichen, and the latter's personality was also somewhat rebellious. Once, when interviewing Qu Ruichen, he said a meaningful sentence to Liu Hanxiang: "Mom is different now than before." "How is it different?" Liu Hanxiang's understanding is, "Qu Ruichen has always felt that what his mother did was right, and when he realized his mother's pain, yes, his mother has changed, he has actually changed, and everyone will change." ”
In the film, Zhai Zinan's attitude towards his father and mother is also completely different. Although Zhai Zi's father's education method is not as strict as Yu Lifan's father, in private, Zhai Zinan is also a little afraid of his father and behaves like an ice hockey player. When alone with his mother, Zhai Zinan would often be spoiled, more like an ordinary child.
Liu Hanxiang said: "In the three years of shooting, I can deeply feel the differences and commonalities shown by several groups of families, and experience the subtle changes in the relationship between father and son and mother and son. The film does not have any grand themes, and watching the children gradually grow, this delicate change in family relations is easy to feel empathy. ”
Director Liu Hanxiang said that he did not want to preach the topic of family education to the audience, but hoped that everyone would slowly understand it through the film. Beijing News reporter Wang Jianning photographed
Liu Hanxiang does not want to convey this kind of thinking to the audience in a didactic way, but hopes that everyone will slowly understand, "Any kind of relationship will have problems, and the difference is whether we realize it or not, and so is the family." I'm not an education expert, but combined with the filming process, I also have a new experience. Family education is about parents and children, and it needs two-way inspiration and common growth. ”
III. Talking about Documentary Recording and Film
The biggest charm of documentary movies is to play games with time
As a leader in young directors, Liu Hanxiang's profession was originally feature films. In 2009, Liu Hanxiang, who was still studying, filmed the documentary "Ma Lan's Singing Voice", which allowed him to associate with documentary films by chance, and he worked deeply in the field of childhood themes for many years, according to his words: "Maybe childhood is not enough." ”
Liu Hanxiang's first documentary work, "Ma Lan's Singing," focuses on a group of children living in a mountain village.
The first documentary, "Ma Lan's Singing", focuses on a group of music-loving children in a remote mountain village, and Liu Hanxiang spent two and a half years in contact, focusing on the group of children, which is a very familiar environment and reminds him of his childhood from time to time. During his rural filming, he was confident that he could photograph the spirituality of his children, and his childhood memories were more like the source of his creations.
In Liu Hanxiang's eyes, childhood is always full of joy and sorrow at the same time, and he is more willing to show all this in a warm way, perhaps it is because of this that "Ma Lan's Song" has also been rated by some fans as the Chinese version of "Spring of the Cattle Herding Class". Later, Liu Hanxiang followed the caravan to the earthquake disaster area in Ya'an, Sichuan, and while showing everyone a movie, he sent cameras to different children to teach them how to record their lives, and another documentary movie "Summer Mobile Cinema" was born.
"Summer Mobile Cinema" records the story between children in the sichuan earthquake disaster area and the movie.
Until 2015, Liu Hanxiang turned the camera from the countryside to the city for the first time, filming the children of the primary school affiliated to Tsinghua University, focusing on the story of children and teachers rehearsing a century-old school history drama, the title of the film is "Young Teenagers". Whenever a documentary film is made, Liu Hanxiang always thinks about his relationship with it and finds a point of convergence. It wasn't until he was shooting "Teenage Boy" that he realized he didn't know anything about the children of the city, which also bothered him very much, "I don't know how to understand them, I don't know how to shoot." 」 ”
As he came into contact with more and more children, so many that he could not count, Liu Hanxiang found that the depth of the documentary film itself did not seem to matter. In the past, he always wanted to mix his childhood feelings, in fact, the profundity of documentary films is not defined by the director and the audience, but related to the times, and what he has to do is to be a good witness and leave an image for people in his contemporaries.
"The biggest charm of documentary movies is that you play with time, you plant a seed, or plant a small sapling, you just need to accompany it to grow up slowly, which is something that feature films can't do." As long as you have the patience to play with it, time will give you a gift. In the children, Liu Hanxiang saw the future, and it didn't matter what he wanted to express.
Liu Hanxiang said that the biggest charm of documentary films is to be able to play with time. Beijing News reporter Wang Jianning photographed
Many people may say that short videos can also leave images for contemporaries and can reflect a part of the world, and Liu Hanxiang does not deny this. It's just that in his view, everyone can speak in the short video era, strictly speaking, it is more like a fragment of the ground, the volume of sound and information is not large enough, and it cannot be conveyed to more audiences, "The fragment itself is not a work, someone always has to pick up the fragments, combine them with different perspectives and different insights, it is a work, which is what the documentary film is doing." ”
Beijing News reporter Sun Haiguang Xu Bangyin
Photography by Wang Jianning
Chief Editor Wu Dongni Proofreader Zhao Lin