This article is the exclusive special manuscript of the Headline Entertainment Jun X Headline Film Critics X China Film Golden Rooster Awards
The hottest person during this time may be the Tibetan boy Ding Zhen.
Starting with a Douyin video, he has been on several hot searches in a row, and even sometimes one person accounts for three hot searches.
At first, we were attracted to his looks, and the purity of the Khampa man immediately hit the hearts of many women.
We are so keen on creating gods, and so keen on destroying gods, it wasn't long before Ding Zhen was pulled off the altar again and "overturned"——
Some say he's marketing hype, some say he's rude with his middle finger, some say he's handsome and self-aware...
After a while, we learned that the 20-year-old boy had not gone to school for a day, and his Chinese basics were almost equal to zero. One of his hands was dark and rough, his bones and joints were swollen, and he looked like a pair of working hands.
After the fire, the villagers used him as a blood sucking bag, chased him to shoot, and there were many "Ding Zhen" accounts on various platforms, and he also had a "spirit boy" like a younger brother.
However, the boy couldn't even read, and he probably hadn't even played TikTok before. In his twenty years of life, herding cattle was the most important thing for him.
And his biggest dream is to be a horse racing prince.
In this farce, most people look at the Tibetan people represented by Ding Zhen with a kind of outsider's eyes, and there are many stereotypes: dirty, not bathing for a long time, no culture, no quality, poor, soil...
We need an objective Tibetan land, a Tibetan people who are not pretentious, do not create spectacles, and do not stereotype.
And there is a director, in his works, there is such a Tibetan place.
Wan Ma Tse-dan, a Tibetan who combines writers, screenwriters and directors.
The most well-known and concerned by the public is Wan Ma Tse-dan as a director.
Since the completion of his debut film "Quiet Ma Ne Stone" in 2005, he has successively produced works such as "In Search of Chi Mei Gengden", "Old Dog", "Tharlo", "Crashed into a Sheep" and other works, and won dozens of domestic and foreign awards such as the Best Screenplay Award at the Venice International Film Festival in Italy and the Best Film Award at the FILMeX International Film Festival in Tokyo, Japan.
Along with these honors is the attention paid by scholars at home and abroad to Wan Ma Tse-dan and the phenomenon of the "new wave of Tibet" set off by him.
Wan Ma Tse-dan's identity as a Tibetan has always enabled him to use a kind of "insider" gaze and persistent "ethnic minority writing" in the film to shoot and examine the various problems experienced by his own nation in the process of development, as well as the various psychological changes of the people.
It can be said that each of his works has great humanistic and artistic value and social value.
Because of this, the news of the release of Wan Ma Tse-dan's new film "Balloon" has also attracted a lot of attention.
Previously, "Balloon" has been successfully shortlisted for the "Horizon" competition unit of the 76th Venice Film, and has traveled all the way to the Toronto Film Festival, Busan Film Festival, Tokyo FILMeX Film Festival, Pingyao, Asian Film Awards and other film festivals, receiving numerous praises.
Like an old man chanting, the director sings modern myths about the ancient Tibetan land in a desolate and pathetic tone between dreams and reality.
Unlike the usual films adapted from novels in the past, "Balloons" has an image first, then a script, and finally a novel.
In 2018, Wan Ma Tse-dan further rewrote and added to the novel, and finally made "Balloon" into a movie.
The biggest image in the film is the red balloon.
Wan Ma Tse-dan also mentioned many times in interviews and exchanges that the "red balloon" is derived from a real experience of his own: "Probably one autumn when I was studying at the Beijing Film Academy, I went to the Central University for Nationalities, and in Zhongguancun, I saw a red balloon floating on the street, and I felt that the image was particularly beautiful and had a sense of cinema. ”
In fact, the image of the "red balloon" has appeared several times in the history of Chinese and foreign films.
For example, the 1956 short film "Red Balloon".
It won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Palme d'Or for Short Films at the Cannes Film Festival, and was praised by French film theorist Bazin in his book What Is Cinema.
Another example is Hou Xiaoxian's "Red Balloon Journey" in 2007, which once again let a red balloon float above Paris.
Unlike these two films, the balloon of Wan Ma Tse-dan is the "balloon" of the Tibetan people, it is a condom (commonly known as a condom), it is a belief, it is a contemporary Tibetan myth, and it is also life.
The film is set in the mid-1990s, when the state made some adjustments to fertility policy in Tibetan areas, i.e. each family could only have three or fewer children, and if they had more children, they would be fined.
However, the film deliberately blurs the specific measures of the policy in the film, pushing it to the background.
Therefore, rather than saying that this is a narrative driving force, "Balloon" is using the name of policy to tell the difficulties and struggles encountered by the Tibetan people in real life.
"Balloon" is a pure and clean Tibetan film, its story is actually very simple, can be summed up in two sentences:
Droga and Daj are a couple who already have three boys, but Drogga is once again unexpectedly pregnant.
For financial reasons, Drogga wants to kill the child, but Dajie feels that it is the reincarnation of his grandfather who has just died and will not let her fight it.
"Balloon" is a story about the nuclear small family, a story about living people, but also about faith, life and death, women's awakening and other major topics.
Wan Ma Tse-dan succeeded in constructing a Farhati-like story in this film, that is, the logic of this story can only be established in the characteristic social and religious context, without which the story cannot stand.
If it weren't for Tibet, which has a strong concept of "reincarnation," this story would not have happened at all.
Tibetans have had the concept of "reincarnation" since ancient times, and the "Dalai Lama" in Tibetan Buddhism depends on the "reincarnation system".
In Tibet, there is an ancient book called the Tibetan Book of Death, which is commonly known as the Tibetan Book of Life and Death, which is about the Buddhist understanding of death.
According to the Tibetan Sutra of death, after death, a person enters a bardo process of seven seven forty-nine days. The Sutra of death is like a guide, guiding the deceased out of the bardo stage and liberating the soul.
Zhuo Ga's eldest son, Jiang Yang, because he had a mole similar to his dead grandmother on his back, was considered to be the reincarnation of his grandmother and was loved by his grandfather.
As soon as the film opens, such a story is used to pave the way for the strong atmosphere of faith that exists in this family.
But interestingly, the director seems to deconstruct religious beliefs time and time again.
The film makes extensive use of alternating images of reality and dreams, and in this dream, we can glimpse the director's true value orientation.
The first dream occurred after the eldest son, Jiang Yang, pulled open his shirt to show his two younger brothers the moles on his back.
In the dream, the mole became a black sticker and was lifted down by his brother. Is this understandable as the director is implying that the mole is fake?
If Jiang Yang is the reincarnation of his grandmother, then who is he?
Grandpa favored him because of the part of him that didn't belong to him—the mole that was thought to be Grandma's.
If the mole is gone, Jiang Yang is just Jiang Yang, not Grandma, does Grandpa still love him? Does he still exist?
This psychoanalytic reflection runs through the film.
Just as the Spanish surrealist painter Dalí had someone else's name from birth, Jiang Yang was identified from birth as another person, not himself.
Later, Grandpa died and Drogga became pregnant again, and the Guru said that the child in her belly was the reincarnation of Grandpa.
The three children were already stretched, and the fourth child had to pay a fine, and the family could not get by, so Zhuo Ga moved the idea of beating the fetus.
However, the husband and eldest son rushed into the operating room and pulled her off the operating table, and the child did not succeed.
This time, the director once again began to deconstruct faith.
Before Droga became pregnant, he used very stylized photography and pictures to present some plots: Dajie's strong sexual desire, the state-issued condoms were not enough, and the two troublemaker sons always tried to steal condoms and blow balloons.
Wan Ma Tse-dan spent a lot of ink on these few things, in order to pave the way for the inevitable pregnancy of Droga.
Faith, on the other hand, has only been brushed over by the director.
This creates an overwhelming bias: between Droga's pregnancy and his grandfather's death, it is simply a coincidence, and the child is not a reincarnation at all.
Wan Ma Tse-dan's extensive display of this coincidental process in "Balloon" is actually a proof that he is already making value judgments.
Another proof is Dolma, The Nun Sister of Droga.
As a nun, we rarely see her chanting, but we often see her "moving her heart" and seeing her anxious for her ex-boyfriend.
Her only insistence on so-called faith is actually a dry, powerless sentence: "I will give my all for religion." ”
Are you sure?
She was just repeating those things, such as chanting and collecting donations, but she didn't actually stop thinking about the world.
Like those mentioned by Žižek, "subjects who are assumed to believe."
Believe it or not, it doesn't matter if you do it or not.
Therefore, In "The Balloon", Wan Ma Tse-dan quietly denies religion.
In addition to religious beliefs and views on life and death, there are also obvious feminist overtones in "Balloons".
The heroine Droga is a tragic character, she wants to miscarry but can only be forced to give birth, endure multiple pressures from patriarchy, religion and government, and has no body or mind freedom.
However, she also personally pushed her sister Dolma into another tragedy, using religion to restrain and save her sister.
Belgian scholar Fang Wensha, in "Wan Ma Tse-dan's "In Search of Zhimei Gengden": Creating "Minority Films"", believes that Wan Ma Tse-dan's films are not the generally recognized minority films, but a kind of "minority films".
Wan Ma Tse-dan's works focus on the diverse and contradictory aspects of contemporary Tibet, and the ultimate goal of these works is to dispel the myth of Tibet as a marginal and "eternal unchanging" and to reposition the Tibetan experience within the framework of Chinese and global social reality. Thus, it is in line with what the French structural giants Deleuze and Gathari call 'a handful of films'."
This "minority film" emerged from the trend within the mainstream, was part of the mainstream, and maintained an ever-changing character that refused to remain static.
In other words, the changes that take place in each of Wan Ma Tse-dan's films are noteworthy, and he himself has shown in interviews that the phrase "fixed style from beginning to end" is dismissed.
In "Balloon", the director's suspicion of religion reflects, to a certain extent, the changes and wavering in the attitude of the contemporary Tibetan people toward religion.
It is worth mentioning that this is the first time that Wan Ma Tse-dan has presented this problem so intensively in the film.
In previous films, he has always held a respectful attitude toward religion, and has not seriously explored this issue, mostly showing the relentless invasion of Tibet by modernization.
For example, the little lama attracted by the TV program in "Quiet Ma Ne Stone", the Tharlo who was looted by the urban society in "Tharlo", the Qinghai-Tibet who collided with old and new concepts in "In Search of Zhimei Gengden"...
In addition to the text itself, in "Balloons", Wan Ma Tse-dan also has some mutations in the audiovisual style.
The large use of handheld long lenses and low illumination makes the tone and picture of the film constitute the display of the character's psychological state, such as depression, contradiction, anxiety, etc.
From the first film, "Quiet Ma Ne Stone", Wan Ma Tse-dan's film audiovisual style has actually been changing: the black-and-white photography of "Tullow", the commercial attempt of "Colorful Arrow", the alternating presentation of dreams and reality in "Crashing into a Sheep"...
Whether it is the artistic value of the film text or the change in the director's technical technique, "Balloon" is a very noteworthy work.
At present, Wan Ma Tse-dan has not formed a stable style of "author film".
However, standing at the intersection of the three lines of Tibetan, Chinese and world, Wan Ma Tse-dan's works have a lot of attention. He was able to concretize the dilemmas, contradictions and changes in the development of Tibetan modernization while telling contemporary Tibetan fables.
In the works of Wan Ma Tse-dan, Tibet is no longer a static place. Through these works, the public can learn about a more authentic and mobile Tibetan society.
This is the greatest value of Wan Ma Tse-dan for the audience.
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