On the evening of October 18, the fifth Pingyao International Film Festival came to an end, and on the "Night of Honor", 41-year-old Chongqing female director Li Dongmei once again stood on the stage of the Pingyao Film Palace, but her identity changed from last year's best film award winner to this year's judges and awardees. However, Li Dongmei was not as excited as expected, and in an exclusive interview with the upstream reporter, he said that when he returned to Pingyao after a year, he felt very calm, and talked about the new film he was preparing, and the words became more.
Last year, he won the Best Picture Award in Pingyao
"Mom and Seven Days"
"I was invited by the organizers two months ago to serve as a judge, because according to the tradition of the Pingyao International Film Festival, the winners of the previous edition will be judges at the next edition, so it is not surprising." Li Dongmei told reporters.
"From October 12th to 17th, one or two movies will be watched every day, and then the judges will discuss, and the final winning films are almost my favorite films", at the "Night of Honor", Li Dongmei and Bi Gan, Ning Ying, Anna Isa Martin and others formed the "Roberto Rossellini Honor" jury to announce the final international film "Crouching Tiger Unit" winner list.
Looking back at 2020, Li Dongmei's first feature film "Mother and Seven Days" is undoubtedly one of the most concerned domestic films, not only shortlisted for the Venice Day Unit of the 77th Venice International Film Festival and the "Window of Asian Cinema" unit of the 25th Busan International Film Festival, but also won the Fei Mu Honorary Best Film Award at the "Night of Honor" of the 4th Pingyao International Film Festival. On February 8 this year, she won the Ingmar Bergman Award at the 44th Gothenburg Film Festival, and Li Dongmei became the first Chinese director to win the award.
Chi Qingbo, the producer of "Mother and Seven Days" and a Chongqing filmmaker, told reporters that this award-winning film is still a "made in Chongqing", and the producers, directors, screenwriters, producers, and main actors are all from Chongqing.
In August 2019, the film started filming in Futian Town, Wushan County, which is Li Dongmei's hometown.
At the age of 12, he walked out of the mountains and began to study film at the age of 31
"I grew up in the village in the movie until I was 12 years old, walked out of that mountain, and didn't start learning movies until I was 31 years old," said Li Dongmei, the first student in the village to be admitted to university, after graduating from the Sichuan Foreign Language Institute, she worked as a middle school English teacher, opened a kindergarten, and later went to Shenzhen to engage in preschool education.
At the age of 31, Li Dongmei, who has always loved photography, suddenly had the idea of making a movie because she accidentally saw an Iranian movie, and then was admitted to the Victoria School of Art at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she shot many short films. After returning home, she was involved in some film shooting, and when she had the opportunity to shoot her first feature film, she decided to bring her mother's story to the screen.
Li Dongmei's mother died on the 29th of August in 1992, when she was 12 years old, "Mother and Seven Days of Time" is based on this personal experience, telling the story of the seven days before and after the death of her mother, "I have always wanted to use this film to say goodbye to the deceased mother, so the story and the scenes filmed are more real, try to present those memory fragments in the most simple and concise way, without any embellishment and rendering." Li Dongmei said that the old man who played the neighbor in the movie was his 89-year-old grandmother, and the old man who played the grandfather, and now they have passed away.
Because it is to return to a familiar place to shoot, even if it is a very ordinary scene, Li Dongmei will burst into tears when she is in the scene, "for example, seeing me walk the road to elementary school for 6 years, such as shooting a girl reading a book, I will not be able to control the tears, because the emotional backlog is too long, too strong." 」
New films in the pipeline will also be filmed in Chongqing
In the process of shooting the feature film for the first time, Li Dongmei encountered many problems, and the starting capital was Li Dongmei borrowed from the bank with the help of her sister, and she borrowed money while shooting the film. Although the film has won numerous awards today, "some of the [accounts] have not been paid off until now."
In September this year, Li Dongmei became a lecturer in film production at a university in Shanghai, and while teaching, she was still waiting for "Mother and Seven Days" to appear in theaters, while also preparing her second film, "Now there are many companies that have actively expressed their intention to invest, which is not as difficult as when the first film was made."
The reporter learned that Li Dongmei's new film will also be filmed in Chongqing, "'Mother' is a story that takes place in the countryside, this will be a modern urban theme, or it will focus on the female perspective, and the narrative rhythm will be different."
In recent years, many film and television dramas have been filmed in Chongqing, but Li Dongmei believes that most of the stories of these films have nothing to do with Chongqing, "just using Chongqing as a background and a 'landscape', in fact, it is okay to put them in Cities such as Wuhan and Changsha."
"For the natives of Chongqing, here is more than a short video platform in the 'net red', here eating, wearing, living environment are irreplaceable," Li Dongmei told reporters, "since the beginning of the university, I lived in Chongqing for more than ten years, the small streets, alleys, terrain and landforms here are very familiar, I want to present the connection between the region and people, those things that are closely related to ordinary people and leave imprints." ”
Upstream journalist Tang Hao