This year's Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film is a top 15 candidate, with Douban 8.6 and Rotten Tomatoes 92%.
Awards, scores, word of mouth, all make you notice it.
But Uncle Meat's feeling after reading it is that it is like a sensitive girl, a letter to the protagonist, and even all girls.
The director, a Vietnamese girl born in 91, is her first feature documentary.
The voice is very crisp and gentle, and the protagonist in the film is considered the same age.
Therefore, when the protagonist encountered misfortune, she could not stand by because of the documentary filmmaker's principle of "non-intervention".
The reason, only for one "she".
The same gender, almost similar encounters, the dark web that cannot be broken, and the embarrassing fate.
What frightened Uncle Rou even more was her words before the start of the documentary.
"After three years of filming, I have always been afraid of the ending."
"Children in the Mist", directed by Ho Liyan, the camera focuses on a Hmong girl in the mountains of northern Vietnam.
From the age of 12 to 14, she shot more than 100 hours of footage, which was finally completed in 90 minutes.
It has both the lightness of a girlish feeling and the heaviness of a cruel fate.
The northern part of Vietnam has a cold, mountainous climate and is also more isolated than the south.
The experience of the small mountain village in the south made He Liyan can't help but ask when he thinks back, will time pass faster in the mountainous areas of North Vietnam?
01
Childhood death
The girl's name is "Qi", she loves to smile, her face is round, and she is lively among friends.
She works very sharply.
When not in school, she helps the family with work, pulling weeds and feeding the pigs. The grass in the cornfield is pulled quickly and abundantly, and occasionally some edible fruit can be found.
After entering junior high school at the age of 12, Ki began to learn to be beautiful.
When the school opened for a cultural performance, she quietly drew some eyelashes and applied light lipstick.
I also began to have a favorite boy who would chat on my phone.
It is a small class leader in the school, and he has to catch students who are not wearing red scarves during recess.
He is cute and lively, and he is still in school.
Qi's life looks no different from the life of the same age that you and I are familiar with, and she is about to change from a child to a teenager.
At the beginning, the director who went to the north to teach also thought so.
She lived in Qi's house at that time, and saw Qi, who had no heart and lungs, playing with playmates in the yard, and at the same time, the director who grew up in the northern ethnic minority had the idea of making a documentary.
Qi is a very natural subject, plus his family does not resist the camera, and he is familiar with it after getting along for so long. I borrowed a very old camera and microphone from a friend and started shooting, which lasted for three years.
As she delved into Qi's life and this misty mountainous area, she became more and more aware of-
Here, the disappearance of a girl's childhood carries much more than a feeling of nostalgia.
It is the long-hidden gender-based violence in the ultra-patriarchal community that has survived for generations.
From an early age, Hmong children play a game to catch the bride.
Kiki also played with her sisters.
Let's play Bride Catch!
Children play several roles -
Abducted brides, wedding robbers, sisters who protect the bride, and mothers who are sent away from marriage.
The bride resisted desperately, but the robber refused to stop, the bride's sister held her sister and refused to let go, and the mother who sent the marriage watched from the sidelines.
At this time, the girls were imitating with excitement, and their expressions were all smiling.
Unconsciously, this joke is actually a dress rehearsal.
That's right, it's not just games.
It is a "marriage robbery" custom that continues to this day by the Hmong people.
A sexual crime that carries the banner of folklore.
During the Lunar New Year, men kidnap their favorite girl as a bride, and after abduction, they ask the woman to kiss her family, and if the girl runs away during this period, it will be considered a disgrace to his family.
Many underage girls are forced to marry in this way.
Kie's mother
Can Ki escape this nightmare?
At the 14-and-a-half-year-old New Year's rally, she and her male friend "Wang" who is having an affair confirm a boyfriend and girlfriend relationship.
That night, he took her home.
On the way home, the boy said this "promise" to the camera that made people cry and laugh.
I'm decent
Will ask her parents before marriage, will not kidnap her
Qi didn't expect that she would be greedy for fun for a while and break into a big disaster.
The next day, he became a woman to be married (sold), and the two families began to "negotiate":
2,000 yuan for dowry, 300 yuan for gifts from relatives, 10 kg of chicken, 100 kg of pork, 20 liters of wine.
What should Ki do?
Qi, who returned from the man's house, realized that Wang was not a good match.
Wang's father, like his father, is a drunk, and he and Wang can't talk, and their relationship is not deep enough to get married.
(She's only 14 years old after all.)
Obviously, her parents, who had already negotiated a deal, and her in-laws, who were satisfied with her, refused to understand and did not want to accept it.
She didn't know how to deal with it, and the first thing she thought of was to hide in the school, a place that still pays attention to the order of modern civilization.
But her mother quickly chased her and took her, and even if the teacher said to call the police, she didn't care:
You hide in this will lose our family's face
Go to his cop, she's my daughter
The matter soon fermented further, and the man and his family came to the door again and forcibly dragged her away.
The girl went from polite refusal to crying for help, and her family just stood by in silence.
There is also a conventional rule in the vice of marriage robbery, and the woman's parents must not interfere.
In despair, Qi shouted to the director: Save me.
The director reached out to rescue her: let her go.
Qi's grandmother stopped the director: leave her alone.
In this way, she was dragged out the door until her hands and feet were completely off the ground, and she screamed uselessly with all her strength.
Childhood rehearsals, come true.
And this scene is just the fate of girls of this race, too common.
02
The same nightmare
In the past three years that the director has been following Qi, he has gradually opened up the picture of women in this mountainous area with her as the main axis.
Ki's sister, Ra.
Qi once told the director about her sister's story, and La was kidnapped by her husband on the New Year when she was 15 years old.
The mother who loves to drink is drunk and waits until she wakes up to find that her eldest daughter has disappeared for a while, and it is too late.
She was supposed to be of high school age, but she dropped out early and is now pregnant with her second child at the age of 17.
Qi giggled when she spoke, she still didn't understand her sister's suffering, but just muttered softly after getting up:
She just wanted to play, but her childhood ended there
Qi's mother is also a tied bride.
On the night after Kiki was tied up, his father laughed proudly at the camera about his wedding robbery feat that year.
In their custom, girls were not supposed to go out after four o'clock in the afternoon, but Qi's mother sneaked out and was kidnapped at once.
This strong marriage was not happy, and on the night that Qi was robbed, her mother couldn't sleep:
Her husband insulted her all day when he was drunk, La and Ki were gone, leaving her alone at home, and life would only be harder.
Being kidnapped and married, but not the cruelest fate of the girls.
Girls are abducted and sold, many of them.
That marriage robber Wang, his sister was sold to China, and has not been heard from since.
Qi's classmates were raped by boys in the same class on their way to school and were almost trafficked.
There are even girls who are raped and killed on their way to school.
Have you mentioned that the camera can defuse tension and violence on set, and even use it as a defensive weapon?
They live near the border between Vietnam and China. In 2018, Qi's Tongyue was raped on her way to school and almost sold to China, but fortunately she escaped. Her kidnapper was a boy in Qi's class. In fact, there are indeed girls at Qi's school who are raped and killed on their way to school. When I was filming Qi, I found that male classmates were less likely to harass her.
2022TIDF Express | Interview with He Liyan, director of "Children in the Mist"
Translated | Wang Niankai
A girl has all kinds of ways to be disappeared, and it all seems to be commonplace.
So the night that Qi was taken away, her mother's first reaction would be:
I asked for his number to make sure he wouldn't sell her
A long time ago, the director asked Qi: What kind of girl do you want to be?
At that time, Qi first smiled a little shyly, and then got carried away and danced her claws:
I want to read a lot and make a lot of money
So that I will have many lovers
Of course, catching a horse is indeed childish.
Who would have thought that childhood, which could still have dreams, would pass away so quickly.
Like the candle they lit together that night, it quickly turned into a few drops of wax.
The girl was reluctant and stretched out her palm to catch it.
Ticking, melted candles dripping like tears.
What can be retained?
The girl stared blankly for a while, raised her eyes, her eyes blank and innocent.
At the scene of the wedding robbery, behind Qi, who cried "I'm not leaving", were the two sisters.
It is also such a look, looking at everything in front of you.
Looking at what may be your own future.
03
Web of the Mist
Fog is an image that runs through the film, appearing in the title, opening and ending credits.
Just like the habits that have been rooted in this mountain for generations.
Pervasive, too difficult to subside.
In the film, the popularization of compulsory education, the Internet, and communication equipment did not bring about a more civilized order, and did not really pierce the fog that shrouded the mountain.
It just reflects the absurdity of the bad habits of this tribe.
A detail.
School teachers are always distressed by students' unprovoked absenteeism, and when they check, they will find that it is all girls who stand up.
With a little effort, these girls are always taken for granted by the family as labor, and by default are the victims who can give up their studies and self.
The reason for their truancy is that the teacher does not even believe it, what to take care of the buffalo, help Grandma harvest corn ...
In the film, following Qi, we can also see that most of the people who work with adults are also girls.
When Qi didn't want to get married, she also asked for help from her teacher.
The teacher also intervened and enlightened the two families from a legal and ethical point of view.
But the result?
A few days later, the man came to rob the bride.
In an interview after the documentary, when asked about the "difference between Hmong men and women in their views on marriage robbery culture", the director shared her observation: "Most men support marriage robbery. ”
For example, Qi's father said that there is a custom that people who love each other can marry without the consent of their parents. The Hmong translator who translated the film also helped his friends get married when he was young.
Another key reason: "A poor man may also take a wife, because the dowry will be lower than asking for the consent of the woman's parents." ”
To put it bluntly, this is an affordable wife-wooing business. A poor bachelor can easily marry a daughter-in-law.
The drunken father would even jokingly come over and say that he wanted to kidnap the director to his son as a wife.
When Wang came to the door to propose, the father would warn his daughter not to run away, not to embarrass him, and to remember:
You are a woman, not a man
The boy who kidnapped Ki, Wang, dropped out of school because his family had no money.
Facing the camera's inquiry about marriage robbery, he grabbed his hair helplessly:
I was still a kid
I don't know why I kidnapped her
Under the oppression of the two mountains of poverty and sexism, the kidnapping of the bride has become a kind of consensus without thinking, and has become a foggy web that binds countless girls.
Even the mother, who was a victim of marriage robbery, wavered in her attitude.
She didn't want her daughter to marry like that-
I am really afraid that my daughter will follow in her footsteps, but I also regret that I lost a labor force to help feed pigs.
At the same time, she is not completely on her daughter's side to help her refuse the marriage.
For example, on the night she learned that her daughter was abducted, she turned to inquire about the other party's family situation after worrying, and asked three times:
Is he the firstborn?
Are his parents still alive?
And most importantly: is his family rich?
As a mother, she is a little lucky that she may be able to climb the family through her daughter's marriage, and at the same time, she does not dare to refuse marriage and leave a little way back for this poor family:
Qi's younger brother may also go to rob the marriage in the future, and if the daughter refuses to rob the marriage now, the son's marriage robbery in the future will be untenable.
——Interview with the director of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival
And the daughter, who resolutely refused to marry, swore that she wanted to study, work, change her mother's life, and give her everything she deserved.
In "Children in the Mist", we seem to see the ending.
Or because of the camera, the director's roar, at the end of the film, Qi escapes.
But at the beginning, the director's words are still like a hanging hammer, making us unable to breathe.
How did it end?
The film came to an abrupt end.
Through the director's mouth, we know that Qi almost ushered in a reversal.
She successfully completed high school, won a scholarship with excellent grades, and was supposed to go to university, but due to the impact of the epidemic, she was temporarily at home and met a man, married and had children at the age of 17.
I don't know if she will remember sitting on the edge of a high rock at this time, saying to the mountain fog in her eyes:
I wish I could be a kid again
Then turn around.
Walked into another fog.
And I'm more worried.
This fog is trapped, and why not her.
Globally, 21% of girls are married before the age of 18 and 5% before the age of 15. (by Reporting - Violence against Women and Girls: A Handbook for Journalists, UNESCO)
Worker of the day: Buster cold noodles