Documenting the glimmer of a film heralds "the other side of hope"

Li Xiaoliang

Nordic famous director Aki Korismaki has a new work this year. Of course, the minimalist style, cold on the outside and hot on the inside, as usual, are also the big hits of various film festivals during the awards season. For example, before the Berlin Film Festival, it was nominated for the "Best Film" Golden Bear Award, and finally won the "Best Director Silver" Bear Award. The title of the film, "The Other Side of Hope", the theme is still heavy - focusing on refugees, the Finnish cold humor in refugee life, but the warm colors that burst out from the gray and dark of reality. The dawn in the cracks is particularly valuable, and it is also the eye of hope in the door of vitality.

Do not consume suffering, nor do you praise suffering. Light and shadow record reality, but reality is far less idealistic than on the screen. "City of Philharmonic Music" makes you very fascinated, because compared with the pain and struggle in life, confusion and hardship, the film seems to be able to provide another possibility out of thin air, that is, the "other side of hope" outside the hard reality.

Domestic film and television creation once made people desperate. Variety shows and entertainment are not a problem, but too much is too late, excessive consumption of jokes, will indeed dissipate social attention. If domestic creation is only for the box office and clicks, and there is no need to cater to, investment is to circle money, and even sacrifice the only creative dignity, abandon some of the necessary seriousness of literary and artistic works, let everything be meaninglessly dissolved, frivolous and shallow to lose the stickiness of reality, then in the long run, the real despair will grow.

This kind of despair contains two parts: one is that literary and artistic creators with attitudes and persistence are bound by various utilitarian unspoken rules, slaying dragons with skills, and having no way to repay them; the other is to hate the current almost rigid, seriously coarse and homogenized film and television structure, and hope to see healthy and diverse film and television genres - those who should love brainless blockbusters, those who love variety shows, those who love cool and two-dimensional, and those who love literary and artistic niches... Each does its own thing, does not disturb each other - but now it is the despair of the audience who is forced to "the same song" but repeatedly "has no film to choose, no choice to choose".

Some recent changes are worth noting, and a certain piece of the box office is only one side. The other side that is more "hopeful" than this is the simultaneous fit of the expansion of the areas of our creative attention and market feedback and audience recognition. This hope has really come, first there is the quasi-billion dollar club's "Kailash", and now the more low-key focus on history and reality of the masterpiece "Twenty-two" also by word of mouth, there are repeated miracles of scheduling and box office.

"We came too late, they went too fast" – this is a conscience creation in a race against time to save history. Because of the connection between the history of war and the memory of suffering, the creators have never dared to have the slightest disrespect. Restraint everywhere, dare not stir up emotions, and even expression is therefore limited. The film is therefore rough and flawed, but the viewer is shocked. Facing the past, not for consumption, the record is to remember, and then care and reflect. This is the greatest meaning of serious creation rooted in reality.

Filmmakers and audiences ran for the low-key "Twenty-Two", which was almost impossible to promote, and the audience also showed their attitude and effectively supported it. This is the other side of our film's hope. Of course, the support is not to catch up with the fashionable follow-up, but the heartfelt individual expression of their own real sense, which is the benign interaction between filming and watching.