Hello everyone, I'm the eldest cousin.
There is such a female director in China, and her directorial resume has six Golden Film Awards, three Golden Horse Awards and Asian Film Lifetime Achievement Awards.
At the 77th Venice International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, she became the first female director in the world to receive this honor, her name is Xu Anhua.
In Hong Kong, Hui is considered the only woman who can compete with famous male directors.
Of course, controversy ensued, and Xu Anhua's adaptation of Zhang Ailing's novella "First Burning Incense" was shortlisted for this year's film festival.
This movie, from casting to trailer, has not escaped the criticism on the Internet.
The male and female protagonists of the movie "First Incense"
Since "Love in the City" and "Half Life", Zhang Ailing "held hands" for the third time, and Xu Anhua smiled and said before filming, "Willing to risk being scolded".
From netizens to the media, no one is optimistic about her, even if she has made such a masterpiece as "Woman Forty".
She accepts the question gently and calmly, after all, from the movie to life, she has always been so "maverick".
"I can't choose how to live and how to die, but I can choose how to love and how to live, and this is my golden age." 」
Drifting
Xu Anhua, this "saddle" is not the other "An".
A word difference became the fate of the first half of her life.
She was born on May 23, 1947 in Anshan, Liaoning Province, and her name is embedded in it as a commemoration of her birth.
Xu Anhua and his mother
When she was two months old, she was carried to The Swaddle south to Macau with her parents and later settled in Hong Kong.
Anshan in the northeast has since become a geographical symbol of distant viewing.
After finishing secondary school and university, Hui Anhua, who has obtained a master's degree in English Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong, went to London to pursue a film degree at the age of 25.
Xu Anhua (middle)
Mainland China - Macau, China - Hong Kong, China - Britain, the two countries and four places to grow up, people who have migrated many times, everywhere are in detention, can not stop.
30 years ago, the adaptation of Xu Anhua's real life "Ketu Autumn Hate" was released, which is considered to be one of Xu Anhua's most touching and memorable films.
Poster for the movie "Ketu Autumn Hate"
Maggie Cheung played her daughter Xiao'en in it, but Xu Anhua laughed and said that she was not so beautiful: "Maggie Cheung played me, everyone said it was not like it!" ”
Source: Movie "Ketu Autumn Hate"
When I was studying in the UK, I also spied one or two in this movie.
Before the return of Hong Kong, it was colonized by the British for 156 years, and Xiao En had already obtained British citizenship, but she was still looked at and examined as an Oriental, without the right of abode and could not be treated equally.
Hong Kong was only an instrument of British colonial rule. Hong Kong people, at the end of the colonial period, could only be betrayed by the British.
Xiao En returns to Hong Kong with this sense of loss and frustration, and then has to face the tension between her and her mother.
Xu Anhua uses a parallel montage to present the scene of childhood Xiaoen and his grandparents in the film, and on the other hand, he embodies the silent and lonely back of his mother, creating an out-of-place contrast.
Because the mother in the movie is also her real mother, a Japanese lady married to a Chinese officer.
The mother was speechless and had no face, and her husband was out of town and was not welcomed by her in-laws.
In the historical environment at that time, everything here was almost instinctively hostile to her.
The difficulties and frustrations of integration made her mother simply give up, and she missed her homeland of Japan all the time.
It turned out to be wandering, starting with my mother.
After enduring so many years of returning, but the hometown is not the same, the mother's return to the hometown, but from the bottom of her heart tore the hometown to abandon her.
Later, when my mother really went back to Japan once, she began to be uncomfortable, "the things here are raw and cold, or Cantonese food is delicious."
Time had quietly turned her mother into a Chinese woman, and after returning to Hong Kong, her mother never mentioned anything about Japan.
"When I look at my mother's back as I walk away, I feel as if I understand her mood, and at one point I didn't despair of what had I turned my back on? It's just that I was 15 years old at the time, and my mother is almost 50 years old, will she have a chance to be redeemed like me? ”
The chaotic belonging and the wandering of the helpless, it is the mother and Xiao En, the daughter understands the mother, and the two people move towards reconciliation and relief.
At the end of the film, Xiao En becomes a staff member of Hong Kong Television.
Hui Anhua returned to Hong Kong from England, starting as a radio director, and never thought of leaving again.
Xu Anhua
This "Ketu Autumn Hate" is her dream after winning the Hong Kong Academy Awards and the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards.
At the age of 43, she ended her wandering in the movie.
look for
After "Ketu Autumn Hate", Xu Anhua's creation seems to be in a dilemma.
In 1991, the two films "Extreme Tracking" and "Shanghai Holiday" had a mediocre response at the box office and reviews, which made Xu Anhua, who almost won the film, lose confidence and lose the direction of the next shooting.
To make matters worse, she completely rejected her past shooting methods.
So, for the next three years, she didn't make a single film.
At the low point of her career, Asia Satellite TV asked her to return to her old business in the circle and produce a TV interview program "Counting Popular People", which interviewed celebrities such as Huang Yulang, Deng Guangrong, Wu Jiali, Guan Jinpeng, He Chaoqiong and Er Dongsheng.
Leaving the filmmaking team he was familiar with and relied upon, Xu Anhua had to start from scratch, often working with production assistants until late at night.
This is a bit like the situation when she first entered the industry, so that she returned from the dark horse director who won the award for the first film at the age of 32 to the fun and original intention of making films.
This period of time is more like a return in some sense, becoming a turning point in her life.
Finding the feeling, she made "Woman Forty".
Source: The movie "Woman Forty"
A forty-year-old woman, as soon as she opens her eyes without thinking of her own, is all about the embarrassment of both old and young.
Everything in life seemed to be the enemy of her.
This middle-aged woman played by Xiao Fangfang, all the sufferings in her life seem to be stationed in her family in an instant, she is frustrated, struggling but standing up strongly.
You see, the difficulty of life for women makes women's confusion never find answers.
But in the end, there is a way out that can make you feel at ease.
In the city of Hong Kong, every small street and alley is showing countless women's internal and external difficulties, stoic but optimistic lives.
The turning point of a woman's fate seems to be incompatible with society, but it hides a unique value that is hidden by the trivialities of life, which has become the main search and excavation of Xu Anhua's films after "Woman Forty".
Their laughter and tears, sorrow and joy - "I didn't want to show humanistic care at the beginning, I just paid more attention to the fate of the characters."
This is Xu Anhua's feminism, respect for life, and loyalty to himself.
So there is the retired aunt (Schenkova) in "Auntie's Postmodern Life".
Source: The movie "Auntie's Postmodern Life"
Gui Jie (Bao Qijing), a single mother (Played by Bao Qijing) who reads for her son in "The Day and Night in Tin Shui Wai".
Source: The Movie "Day and Night in Tin Shui Wai"
In "Sister Tao", the old maid who has served the Li family for two generations has been working hard, Sister Tao (played by Ye Dexian).
Source: Movie "Sister Peach"
In Xu Anhua's lens, we see more of the reconciliation and tolerance between women and life.
Their lives are like a cup of bitter tea, and they can only return to the sweetness for a long time by savoring it.
Hui Anhua's heroines have all won the film, and "Woman Forty" and "Sister Tao" have become the only two Grand Slam films in the history of the Hong Kong Film Awards (that is, best film, director, screenwriter, male and female protagonist).
Andy Lau, Xu Anhua, Dexian Yip (from left to right)
Xu Anhua found these women, and these women made Xu Anhua.
exist
Hui Anhua became a unique female director in Hong Kong.
And her personal style is too strong, which also makes her look extremely low-key in the tide of Hong Kong directors "going north".
The reason for the widespread spread is that she has a hard time finding investments.
From an investor's perspective, her films are more risky at the box office than other genre blockbusters.
In fact, as early as Hong Kong, she had encountered the same problem.
For example, When Andy Lau talked about his investment and personally acting as the male lead of "Sister Tao", it only stemmed from a sentence by Xu Anhua that made him sad: "I haven't had enough money to shoot for a long time." ”
The constraints of life forced her to return to school several times during the filming years to teach, "with high remuneration and housing allowances, which made her life a little secure."
During the interview, he also spoke out about his embarrassment.
"What state do you think of nothing?"
A: "There's no money left." ”
"Has there ever been?"
A: "Yes." ”
"What are you after then?"
She threw out two words: "There is money." ”
Later, she found mainland investment, and she chose Xiao Hong, who had recognition and topicality, as the subject matter to shoot "The Golden Age".
Tang Wei, Wang Qianyuan, Wang Zhiwen, Zhu Yawen, Huang Xuan, Feng Shaofeng... Such a large investment with the card division, the ink poster has attracted countless eyeballs as soon as it comes out.
Poster for the movie "Golden Age"
The lens of God's perspective, the staged recitation, the literary lines, the alternating black and white echoes, the pioneering experimental shooting methods made the film bleak at the box office, but it was Xu Anhua's stubbornness: "As long as you adhere to the principle of making a good movie." ”
However, "the times will not match you".
She doesn't regret it, but she's reflecting:
Balance business considerations and self-artistic expression, more popularly, how to take care of boss investment and employee welfare.
She returned to Hong Kong and remembered a Hong Kong story.
It was five or six years ago, when one of her students approached her with 3 million dollars in funding and a 120-page oral history.
That's the story of the student's grandmother, who is now in her 90s and joined the TK Column at the age of 15, and her grocery store became a joint point for hong Kong's New Territories guerrillas.
At that time, Xu Anhua said to him: "I'm sorry, 3 million can't shoot." ”
Then she spent 2 years preparing this story, the story of the Republic of China in Hong Kong.
The theme of the story is very novel, and stars such as Zhou Xun, Huo Jianhua, peng Yuyan and other stars almost have zero remuneration, just because "this is director Xu Anhua".
Xu Anhua named this movie "When is the Bright Moon"——
"My generation can't learn colonial things without learning about them, but we don't know too little about Chinese things. Growing up in such a gap, but also slowly growing in it a sense of identity of its own. ”
This Hong Kong film, which was later given the label of the main theme, is full of Hui Anhua's affectionate look back at the city of Hong Kong, looking down on the ups and downs of the times, and watching the fireworks in the alleys.
This is a war film full of poetry and literary atmosphere.
Many people look at it and say, "Looks good." ”
It is acceptance, loyalty to one's own life, and Xu Anhua's unique existence.
This year, Hui Anhua is seventy-three, unmarried, childless, and his mother in her 90s has been renting in North Point, Hong Kong.
She is still a short child flower head, round black-rimmed glasses, and there is a naïve and happy look in her eyebrows between conversations and laughs, and she can't see the vicissitudes of being old.
Only when talking about the past years, she shows the calmness of dongda's world:
"Good luck is happy, but in the face of bad luck, or very sloppy, I don't mind very much, just be the process." 」
She doesn't think she's a success, she's just glad there's still a scene.
This means that she can also make up for her regrets and make a really good play.
She kept that hope.