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As early as the Pingyao Film Festival in 2021, the news of the explosion of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" spread all over the place, and at that time it undisputedly won four awards of Fei Mu Honorary Best Film, Youth Jury Honorary Film, Fan Film Choice Honor, and Most Popular Film in the Hidden Dragon Unit.
Whether it is the jury or the fan group, after watching it, they are all "shocked".
The following year, "Space Exploration Editorial Office" was nominated at the Beijing International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival, winning two awards in the Attention to the Future section at the Beijing Film Festival, and it was even more difficult to find during the screening at the Beijing Film Festival that September.
On April 1, this pre-booked blockbuster domestic film was finally released, with a box office of more than 30 million in 7 days of release, and it is predicted that the total box office in the mainland will continue to soar, reaching 60 million +. This is already a very surprising box office result for a young director's feature film debut and a small and medium-cost film.
At the same time, the reputation of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" has the trend of winning the film of the year, with more than 100,000 people on Douban scoring 8.4 points, better than 96% of sci-fi films and better than 97% of comedy films.
Kong Dashan, a young director born in 1990, came out with "Space Exploration Editorial Department".
This is Kong Dashan's first feature film, and before that, he had made five short films, from which we can see the creative and growth of director Kong Dashan.
His first short film was 2011's "The Troubles of Young Ma Liao", adapted into the automatic short film "The Adventures of Li Xianji", and it was also in that year that Guo Fan, the director of "The Wandering Earth", shot the live-action feature film "The Adventures of Li Xianji", and Kong Dashan and Guo Fan became acquainted.
Later, Kong Dashan entered the crew of "You at the Same Table" directed by Guo Fan as an assistant director, and in "The Wandering Earth 2" released this year, Kong Dashan was also the assistant director. And Guo Fan not only became the producer of "Space Exploration Editorial Department", but also made a cameo appearance in Guo Fan.
The original idea for Space Exploration Editorial came from a news story Kong Dashan saw when a reporter went to interview a farmer who claimed to have come into contact with aliens, and the farmer told very seriously and sincerely how he encountered aliens and how he caught them through a grid trap that caught hare.
Later, he opened the refrigerator to show the alien's body to reporters, only to find that it was just a lowly alien doll made of silicone. This news later appeared in the plot of "Space Exploration Editorial Office".
At that time, director Guo Fan asked Kong Dashan if he wanted to make a feature film, and Kong Dashan sent the news to Guo Fan and planned to make a pseudo-documentary. With Guo Fan's support and encouragement, Kong Dashan began script writing, but the whole process was slow until Wang Yitong joined.
Wang Yitong and Kong Dashan also met through their works, and the two met at the Pingyao Film Festival in 2017, and they had long appreciated each other's works before that. Wang Yitong later wrote the script of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" with Kong Dashan, and played the role of Sun Yitong in it.
Kong Dashan
"Space Exploration Editorial Department" also has another executive producer, Wang Hongwei, Kong Dashan's mentor when he was a graduate student at the Beijing Film Academy.
In 2015, Kong Dashan was admitted to the directing department of Beijing Film Academy, and on the first day of school, the tutor assigned the homework of shooting pseudo-documentaries, which also became the enlightenment of Kong Dashan's pseudo-documentary training and the beginning of laying the later creative style.
Kong Dashan believes that "the practice of shooting pseudo-documentaries helps to better arrange the story, as well as control the unity of content and form, and the method of pseudo-documentary can be a good exercise tool." Even if I don't make films like this in the future, films of other styles and modes will definitely need a solid story to support a specific film language and worldview. ”
Since then, Kong Dashan began to consciously shoot pseudo-documentaries.
Among them, the pseudo-documentary short film "Legal Future Tense" in 2015 once went viral on the Internet, and even became popular every few years.
The film mimics the form of news reports, telling the story of people in movie theaters who are "suffocated" by literary films, so there is a new law that prohibits everyone from making literary films. Through news reports, the film tells the process of the police "undercover" and "squatting" a literary film crew, and finally killing them all. A serious nonsense brings out strong irony, which is also the beginning of many people's acquaintance with Kong Dashan.
This was carried over to the Space Exploration Editorial Board. One of the success of Space Exploration Editorial Board comes from this remarkable feature.
There are very few pseudo-documentaries released in theaters. In 2016, young director Ma Kai had a horror pseudo-documentary "Zhongxie" that once attracted attention, and it was also predicted to become a box office dark horse at that time, but unfortunately, in the end, for various reasons, it was not released until now.
In 2020, "Auspicious Ruyi" directed by Dapeng is a combination of pseudo-documentary and documentary, but due to the more serious subject matter, the box office is average.
Last year, there was a niche hit "A Very (Unnecessary) Spring Festival Gala", made by a group of overseas Chinese, which tells the process of preparing for a Spring Festival Gala, which is full of difficulties and dangers. The film is full of absurdity and also belongs to the "a serious nonsense" series.
There are also many pseudo-documentaries abroad, but most of the fields in which this creative method is used are in the horror and thriller genres, and it is rare to combine it with comedy and science fiction like "Space Exploration Editorial Department".
Although works such as "The Wandering Earth" and "The Three-Body Problem" have allowed Chinese people to see the great progress of domestic film and television dramas in the sci-fi genre, and have also accumulated a large number of audiences, the soft sci-fi track still lacks works, and the soft sci-fi presented in comedy has a wider audience base than hard sci-fi. This is also one of the key factors in the box office of "Space Exploration Editorial Office".
Of course, form serves the content. "Space Exploration Editorial Office" uses exquisite creativity to tell a tragic story that seems absurd, but is actually romantic.
Tang Zhijun is the editor-in-chief of the editorial office of Space Exploration, a science fiction magazine born in the eighties of the last century. Today's magazine is gradually declining, and Tang Zhijun has finally become a downcast, widow and lonely person. But he remained obsessed with finding extraterrestrial civilizations for decades. Finally, one day, he receives an abnormal signal that seems to come from the depths of the universe, so he gathers his fellow fallen companions and embarks on another journey to find aliens with that question that puzzles him for the rest of his life.
Tang Zhijun's obsession with alien exploration, through the creation form of pseudo-documentaries, and the actor's neurotic performance method, dissolved a lot of serious parts, many times we don't know whether many of his chattering theories are true or false, the more serious he is, the more it can trigger "laughing fruit", so that people inside and outside the play think that this is a serious nonsense "madman".
Tang Zhijun is reminiscent of the idealistic characters in many fables, his persistence and belief is the fool who moves mountains, his ineffective and hopeless repetition is Sisyphus, and his fantasy and anti-era are Don Quixote.
If Tang Zhijun is a resource holder with the right to speak, then perhaps others will be in awe of any "nonsense" about him, but he is precisely a "civil science".
Many folk science enthusiasts, part liars, part "fools", and a very small number of paranoids. Civil science is not completely without skills, but it is indeed more and more mixed, many of their own cultural level is not high, but blind confidence, often research unrealistic "projects", make a lot of jokes, resulting in continuous ridicule.
On this basis, the comedy of the character of Tang Zhijun was established. At the same time, the English name of "Space Exploration Editorial Department" is "Journey to the West" - Journey to the West, and Tang Zhijun corresponds to Tang Sanzang and nags non-stop.
There are Tang monks and others are indispensable, one of the screenwriters mentioned above, Wang Yitong, played by Sun Yitong, corresponds to Sun Wukong.
Sun Yi usually carries a pot every year, he will suddenly faint anytime and anywhere, and suddenly wake up, he can write poetry, and at the same time he has a strong intuition, it seems that there are always miracles that will happen to him.
The other characters are also distinctive. If you have to correspond, Tang Zhijun's colleague Qin Cairong may be the role of Zhu Bajie, reluctant throughout the process, constantly complaining, can be described as a real-time barrage, the audience "mouth replacement", contributed most of the jokes.
There is also a Nari Su, an alcoholic, who drinks anytime and anywhere, gets drunk anytime, anywhere.
Such a combination, on the road to "learning the scriptures" is naturally in constant condition, but whether it is Sun Yitong, who joined last, or Qin Cairong, who complained repeatedly, they all chose to support Tang Zhijun, even if Qin Cairong felt that everything was extremely ridiculous, she still found a way to raise funds and go on the road with Tang Zhijun.
This may be because they know the value of an idealist, and they are moved by the spirit of Sisyphus in Tang Zhijun, who believes that this "normal" world needs to support such seemingly "abnormal" people.
Both Tang Zhijun himself and his "team" reflect the extremely rare and precious attachment at present, and perhaps the objects of their attachment are different. Some people are to explore an answer, some are to protect an emotion, but to be able to embark on the absurd road of being "ridiculed" by the "group ridicule" with the "paranoid and stupid" Tang Zhijun may not be to gamble on a result, but to try to pin their weakness on others and seek a breakthrough.
"Space Exploration Editorial Department" uses the creation form of pseudo-documentary, handheld photography, jump cutting, and frame extraction editing style to try to ask the universe an inner answer, and finally returns to the origin of human emotions.
In "Space Exploration Editorial Office", the alien is an inferior silicone doll waiting for a destined person in the villager's freezer, and it is also an image that can be explored and traced, but can never be reached, it is science, and it will suddenly go to metaphysics.
There are not many spectacles in the film, but it is shocking when the sparrow is full of stone lions; But when the donkey who ran away appeared, people felt the touch of the miracle; But after Tang Zhijun ate the poisonous mushroom, he let the answer land safely in the hallucination.
After all this, recall Tang Zhijun's sentence "This is not an ordinary TV snowflake point, this is the afterglow of the birth of the universe", it seems that everything is not so ridiculous.