The best domestic production, aimed at such women and women

Text ∣ South Wind Window Reporter Huang Mingting

A cry of "Mom! It is the first words that children learn, and they are also linked to the life problems of separation, sickness, and death. A set of "women's trilogy", self, parent-child, family, presents multiple aspects of life. From the perspective of a female director, Yang Lina puts those sufferings that are rarely discussed, orphans, mothers and daughters, and the elderly, on the table, uses the lens to look at it, records it with images, and weaves a movie like the movie "Mother! The daily philosophy of life: calmly deal with the suffering of life, and give birth to poetry in the suffering.

In February in Beijing, in the clear and cold after the snow, Yang Lina, wearing a black coat and gray cold hat, approached me. She first gave me a big hug, and last October's "Mom! Like the interview when she was released, she still gave people a warm feeling.

2022 "Mom! The release of " means the end of Yang Lina's "female trilogy". The two leading actors Wu Yanshu and Xi Meijuan also became the best actress at the Beijing International Film Festival and the best actress at the Golden Rooster Award.

At the Beijing International Film Festival, Wu Yanshu and Xi Meijuan won the "Queen of Two Shadows" (the first from the right is director Yang Lina)

The results of "Double Shadow Queen" made Yang Lina have a good understanding of "Mom! She said: "The two teachers won the award, which was happier than I was to win the award myself." ”

But when I saw her this time, she was a little tired, and her mind was occasionally distracted during the interview, because she was always anxious about the upcoming documentary.

Yang told me that she was planning a documentary about the purple ribbon mom group. This is the follow-up to "Spring Tide" and "Mom! After that, she once again focused the camera on the mother group.

Regarding the relationship between mother and mother and daughter, Yang Lina once felt that "I have filmed enough, and I don't want to shoot anymore". But in "Mom! During the roadshow, one day, Yang Lina received a private message, which was sent by a "purple ribbon mother". The other party said that she hoped that she could pay attention to this group of mothers who were snatched away by their husbands (ex-husbands). As a woman, a mother, and a filmmaker, responsibility told her: the camera can't stop.

"Spring Tide" stills

From "Women's Director" to "The Girl and the Horse", the later women's trilogy "Spring Dream", "Spring Tide" and "Mom! , and now the focus on purple ribbon mothers, Yang Lina has been shooting women's subjects.

"This is my creative vein, and there are traces to follow." Yang Lina said, "I think this has a very important relationship and origin with our gender, perspective and who we are. ”

In the creation and expression, confirming "who I am" and thus moving towards a broader community of destiny is a creative creed of female directors derived from responsibility.

01

How should we age

Sitting down in a café, Yang Lina took off her cold hat, revealing her short hair. The dark circles under her eyes revealed her exhaustion, but the bean-colored lipstick and kind smile were gentle and sensual. After taking a sip of hot milk, she unhurriedly talked about her recent situation.

"Mom! After the roadshow of Hainan Island International Film Festival, she devoted herself to the judging of the documentary section of the Hainan Island International Film Festival. At that time, the epidemic prevention policy had just been relaxed, and many guests and audiences who were scheduled to participate in the film festival had to be absent because of the "Yang". The annual movie festival seems a bit deserted.

Her mother, who went to Hainan with Yang Lina, was also "yang". That week, Yang Lina oscillated back and forth between the review work and the care of her mother, although busy, but fortunately she was not infected, and a week later, her mother also healed.

During that time, every time she heard that some old people had gone away due to illness, her heart would always feel compassion. The elderly are one of the groups she knows best. Growing up next to her grandmother, she has always cared for and cared for the elderly. This care is reflected in her creations.

"Mom! stills

In 1996, Yang Lina was 25 years old and an actor in the General Political Repertory Troupe. One day, she met a group of retired old men on the road. Under the blue sky, the old men sat at the foot of the red brick wall, wrapped in white-washed black cotton clothes, basking in the sun, and you discussed sentence by sentence: "Is there a window on the plane?" ”

This kind of daily and exploratory scene attracted Yang Lina to approach them. She picked up the DV machine and aimed it at this group of ordinary elderly people living nearby.

Day by day, patting and patting, the group of elderly people talked about more and more topics, about retirement life, medical insurance, pension pressure... Until the death of an old man "Master Song", the theme and meaning of the work also emerged with the flow of life: how should people face birth, old age, illness and death.

This DV work is Yang Lina's debut novel "Old Man". After 3 years, "Old Man" portrays a group of elderly people who are indifferent and calm in the face of daily trivialities and life and death events, and also records the passing of the lives of 7 elderly people.

The old man under the lens of Yang Lina

If Yang Lina's impulse to shoot when she was young was instinctively and moved, then now that she has passed the age of destiny, when she is slowly approaching the age of "old men", she is more able to empathize with the old people, and gradually gives birth to a kind of empathy: What will people face when they are old? Loneliness, physical illness, death... These are all irresistible circumstances. How should people face aging and death?

At present, after experiencing the new crown epidemic, many people are separated from their loved ones Yin and Yang before they have time to grieve and say goodbye, Yang Lina will always think of those old people, and still sigh for their attitude of not panicking, being particularly calm, and then not having sorrow and joy when facing life and death.

"Old Man"

Yang Li Na has never stopped caring for the elderly. In 2008, when the economy was growing the fastest, Yang Lina was still paying attention to the elderly. "Lao An", created at that time, records the joys and sorrows of a ninety-year-old man when the light of love is rekindled and the lamp of life is about to go out.

And "Mom! is the story of a mother and daughter who are more than 150 years old together. Before the times are turbulent, their bodies are aging, Alzheimer's disease strikes and their lives are over, they will entangle their mother and daughter, gently care for each other when they love, write letters and read poetry to each other, quarrel when they hate, and even slap each other.

At the end of the film, the mother and daughter wear ironed cheongsam, exalting their dignity as intellectuals for a moment, and calmly walk towards the sea.

Their next step is to go to the distant unknown ocean, or return to the nearby safe beach? The film does not give an answer. But compared to the result, that calmness is more rare and memorable.

"Mom! Mother and son snuggling each other embrace the sea

"There is a kind of beauty, innocence, and calmness in the old man," Yang Lina said to Nanfeng Window, "It will remind us how to grow old." ”

In 2022, Yang Lina will use this drama film where poetry and philosophy coexist "Mom! , completed the renewed focus on the elderly group. At a time when the population is aging and the incidence of Alzheimer's disease has become the crux of the times, this kind of attention will be given a strong realistic color by the outside world, and it has also become one of the most concerned Chinese films of that year.

In Yang Lina's creative career spanning 26 years, "Mom! is another creative cycle of freeze portraits of old people, and it is also the final chapter of the "women's trilogy" that she has been diligently composing in the past 10 years. Caring for the elderly and exploring women, Yang Lina's two creative paths intersect in this film.

Going forward, whether it is the elderly or women, or the orphans in the orphanage in "Weeds", and the private image "Family Video" of dissecting the marriage of her parents, Yang Lina's creative context is born from life experience - what she experienced, met and saw. This context points to a kind of self-identity confirmation: where do I come from and where am I going?

02

Mothers, daughters and women

Once, in Yang Lina's view, embarking on the road of film creation was a kind of "destine". She was destined to meet these old people, destined to know this group of orphans.

Because of "The Old Man", she became famous early, and at the age of 27, she won the Asian New Wave Excellence Award at the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival in Japan, the Jury Prize at the Paris Real Film Festival and the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival in Germany. This made her an early celebrity director in the Chinese documentary industry.

When she was young, Yang Lina, after jumping out of the best drama troupe, her smooth experience in the field of imaging gave her a wild nature, just do it, and rarely think about worldly things such as money and materials.

A photo of Yang Lina and the old people during the filming of "Old Man" (the first from the right is Yang Lina)

But it was the birth of her daughter "Little Bear" that changed her perspective of examining life and self, and also made her creative context turn.

At the age of 32, Little Bear was born in her life. For Yang, this is a gift of life, but it is also a limitation of her creation, because "you are no longer yourself," Yang said in an interview with People.

After becoming a mother, Yang Lina suddenly realized that she needed money. Around the age of two, mother and daughter begin to rely on each other, and she sometimes feels indebted to Cub because the role of father is absent from her daughter's upbringing. But the mother and daughter still live relatively freely.

After graduating from primary school, Little Bear did not receive mainstream education, because school education could no longer satisfy the little girl's vigorous thirst for knowledge, but various regulations limited her vitality. Yang Lina once revealed that Little Bear was ostracized at school and bullied. This made Yang Lina give birth to an instinctive stress response, as in "Mom! "Every mother is a she-wolf". Later, she escaped school with Little Bear and began her study abroad experience from the international city to the countryside.

"Mom! "Every mother is a she-wolf"

During the interview, I asked Yang about Little Bear's recent study in the UK. Because of the "strike wave", Cubs' classes were forced to be suspended.

In Yang Lina's description, Little Bear is a very assertive child. She will encourage Yang Li Na to make more money because she has to raise children.

But in Little Bear's view, his character is related to the equal relationship between mother and daughter. On the second day of the interview, Yang Lina pulled a group for me and Xiaoxiong to facilitate a cross-border online interview.

In the group, Yang Li Na called the little bear "Sister Xiong". When Yang Lina felt sorry that her exhaustion affected the status of the interview, Little Bear would comfort her in turn: "It's hard for you to disappoint, and few people are as sincere as you." ”

The state of getting along between the two is not so much a mother-daughter relationship as a pair of sisters across generations.

Xiaoxiong told me that since she was a child, Yang Lina has respected her ideas, "will not directly interfere with my decisions, will not overemphasize her authority as a mother". If the bear wants to raise a cat, a dog, or even a horse, Yang Li Na will agree. Even if the little bear goes abroad, the cat is actually raised by Yang Lina, even if the price of raising a horse is not affordable for ordinary people.

During the study tour accompanying Little Bear, Yang Lina was creating different scripts, including about marriage stories and two mother-daughter relationships with different degrees of warmth and coldness, and also filmed the documentary "Girl and Horse" with several friends during Little Bear's learning horsemanship.

Yang Lina's filming "Girl and Horse" while Little Bear was learning horsemanship

Yes, the experience of becoming a mother has quietly added new inspiration to Yang Lina's creations at that time. She once believed that her female perspective was constantly condensed through marriage and motherhood. It was Xiaoxiong's unintentional words later that made her cognition of her own female identity go back to the source again.

During a conversation, Yang introduced that she had held a screening in the UK. The screening was her private video "Home Video" after "Old Man". In this work, Yang Lina focuses the camera on the collapse inside her family.

This is also the first time that Little Bear has seen what his mother's native family looked like before.

"Home Video"

After reading it, Little Bear said to her: "It turns out that you came out of such a family. This sentence made Yang Lina realize that the enlightenment of her female consciousness originated from her mother's misfortune in marriage.

"As a female director and female author, I have endless stories of women. If we don't care about ourselves, then who cares about us? In the interview, Yang Lina said.

03

A community with a shared future for women

Women's subjectivity needs to be seen, and Yang Lina also practices the subjectivity and initiative as a female creator.

In 2013, Yang Lina was just over 40 years old, and she began to create women's films.

At that time, there were many remarks and stereotypes on the Internet, such as "gold worship girl", "would rather sit in a BMW and cry than laugh on a bicycle", and "love without material things is like a plate of scattered sand". Yang Lina feels that women at this time, on the one hand, seem to have a lot of freedom, but on the other hand, they are also bound by desire, "when they can buy and sell with money, more and more materialistic", which is a test for women.

At that time, most of the female images in film and television works were tragic and happy roles in love and marriage, or as vases and supporting roles, and there were very few "examining her own films from a woman's perspective". This is exactly the gap that Yang Li Na wants to fill.

"Women's identity is not only a self-thing, but also social, and the stories I tell about women are the circumstances of people in this era."

With the free funding of friends and the starring of her good friend Xue Hong, Yang Lina produced the movie "Spring Dream". This is a film that focuses on the anxious situation of housewives in the spiritual world in reality and dreams, and it is also the beginning of Yang Lina's first work from documentary to feature film, the "Women's Trilogy".

"Spring Dream" poster

After "Spring Dream", Yang Lina continued to campaign for the next women's film, although the female theme did not gain much capital and industry favor at that time.

Producer Li Yaping once revealed to the media that Yang Lina's nervousness and disappointment at a film venture capital conference in 2016.

That day, Yang Lina introduced her ideas to others over and over again: "To take portraits of Chinese women, women's voices should be heard." At that moment, Li Yaping knew the significance of this movie to Yang Lina.

That night, one venture capital project after another was announced, but until the end, Yang Lina's name was never mentioned at the scene.

But a second female film was still born, called "Spring Tide", starring Hao Lei and Jin Yanling as a mother and daughter who love and hate each other and hurt each other. And in this mother-daughter relationship with water and fire, there is also the role of granddaughter "Guo Xiaoting".

"Spring Tide" stills

These three female characters have strong traces of director Yang Lina's life. The mother Ji Minglan in "Spring Tide" has a strong desire to control, and when she was young, she personally reported her husband and spoke ill of her daughter. In this suffocating family environment, daughter Guo Jianbo has been depressed and quiet, but it will also burst out in an instant. This mother-daughter relationship of love and killing each other has a bit of Yang Lina's mother and aunt, and it is also like getting along between their two generations.

And granddaughter Guo Xiaoting is a conciliator between mother and daughter of the previous generation, and some small ghosts always pop out of her mouth: "Grandma, is it appropriate for you to say so about your husband?" "Am I coming out of your front ass or out of your back ass?" On the phone, Little Bear told me that Guo Xiaoting's image has many traces of herself in reality.

Yang Lina defines the mother and daughter in "Spring Tide" as "a pair of mothers and daughters in the world, who may not heal even until death". But 100 pairs of mothers and daughters have 100 ways to get along, after filming the middle-aged mother and daughter of "Spring Tide", Yang Lina wants to shoot a movie for the elderly mother and daughter, they are not as worldly as "Spring Tide", but intellectuals, with the smell of books, this is the movie "Mom! The prototype of ".

"Mom! The mother and daughter in " are full of deep love. "They would write letters to each other and read poetry together. These small details are all derived from the traces of Little Bear and Yang Lina's daily relationship.

"Mom! stills

In October last year, Yang Lina was busy with "Mom! In the national roadshow, Little Bear sent a "letter" to Yang Lina on the way to the UK for transit, which contained Little Bear's questions about alienation and identity, which was the confusion of "where is the rural pass".

Born in Qingdao and raised in Beijing, Little Bear often returns to Yang Lina's hometown of Changchun, and now he is studying abroad alone. "She looks like she has a lot of options, but she really doesn't have anything."

On the train to the next roadshow city, Yang Lina "replied" to Little Bear: "The places that really warm people, one is the womb, the other is the cemetery, they are all comfortable and safe, and they are not places to stay for a long time." Accept your insecurities. Who you are, where you come from, how you are I love you, I think this is also a kind of hometown. ”

After the "Women's Trilogy", she felt that she had filmed enough "mother-daughter relationship". But fate still allowed her to meet a new mother-daughter relationship - purple ribbon mother.

During the Spring Festival, from the first to the third day of the Lunar New Year, Yang Lina has been in contact with several "purple ribbon mothers" to understand the recent situation and communicate shooting ideas. These purple ribbon mothers are scattered all over the country, some in Beijing, Shandong, Jiangsu, Fujian and so on. Yang Lina expects to start shooting around April and finish shooting in the first half of this year.

But at present, there are still many trivial problems in front of Yang Lina, such as the completion of the project book, the pulling of investment, and the formation of a shooting team. Speaking of this, her slightly tired eyes were a little out of focus.

As a mother, Yang Lina can understand the pain of purple ribbon mothers. Every day on her mobile phone, when watching how these mothers use justice and personal efforts to achieve their meeting with their children, Yang Lina feels "particularly heart-wrenching", and the separation from her own flesh and blood is tantamount to a kind of skin pain.

In the TV series "Downton Abbey", mother and son are separated

"[Depriving children of meeting their mothers] is ridiculous, very dark, and I feel angry myself. This not only has a bad effect on the child's development, but also a kind of violence. Yang Lina said.

As directors, films can give them a voice, but they need to support, protect and supervise this group at the societal level.

On the day of the interview, she was also contacting the NPC deputies who could speak out and propose for the purple ribbon mother group, hoping to provide other forms of help for this group outside of the movie.

Whether it is the mutual aid of purple ribbon mothers, the attention of non-governmental organizations such as the Women's Federation, or the creation of this group in the media and film fields, in Yang Lina's view, it is all about creating and maintaining a community of female destiny. This is exactly what she has insisted on creating for many years in the field of film and documentaries.

"What do we do in film? What my film does is a community of shared future for women. Yang Lina said, "Whether we can focus on women's identity, whether we can care about the fate and plight of women, and whether we can become a community of women's destiny are a basic definition of women's films." ”

Edit | Jiang Jiang

Typesetting | Zheng Zewei

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