On December 26, the movie "Fireworks in the World" was announced to be finalized and will be released in theaters nationwide on January 13, 2024. It is a film that is "co-starred" by 509 ordinary people. The film presents a group portrait of contemporary Chinese who have left their homeland and struggled on the front line of social production: they experience the heat and cold of life in the fields, in the factory, in transportation, and in the reinforced concrete. Although the regions and occupations are very different, the reunion is their common expectation: only joys and sorrows are worth year after year.
The film simultaneously released the finalized poster of "Slices of the Times". In the poster, a "road home" stretches in a spiral, with a middle-aged wanderer walking home with luggage and a huge brown bear doll on his back. Along the way, trucks, trucks, fishing boats and other means of transportation shuttle between the various slices, connecting different times and spaces, while ordinary people from different occupations and fields, such as truck drivers, fishermen and construction workers, are scattered in different spaces, and together they constitute this wonderful and steaming era.
"Fireworks in the World" breaks through the original form of most of the world's mass films, it abandons the process of image collection, and chooses to salvage the existing documentary images in the massive UGC video library and edit them into an "alternative" vertical screen film - this is a very risky attempt for the main creative team.
The film creation process lasted a year, and more than 800 vivid and vivid life images of ordinary people were selected from more than 50,000 materials on the Kuaishou platform, which were made by 509 "amateurs", simple and novel, joy and tears, together constitute a true portrayal of thousands of contemporary Chinese, presenting a variety of life and contemporary China that have never been seen on the big screen.
Director Sun Hong said, "These user images of 'recording themselves' are different from the characteristics of traditional documentary films, and have the power to be more real than the real. ”
Jia Zhangke, the founder of the Pingyao International Film Festival and a famous director, also affirmed the pioneering significance of the film: "The first time I saw "Fireworks in the World", I noticed its 'contemporaneity', the film itself is very contemporary and experimental, it represents a new way of expression and lifestyle. ”
In the director's view, the protagonists of "Fireworks in the World" are a group of "civilian heroes", and they can even be said to be the co-directors of this film: "Everyone must face the suffering in life, and the real heroes still lose their courage and do not forget the beauty of life in the suffering." ”
"Fireworks in the World" uses the original ecology of all living beings to form a rare video memo. They are the "little people" who are often ignored on the big screen, the majority in numbers, but the minority in attention.
These incomparably simple but vigorous faces are scarce, more specific, vivid and more moving images on the big screen, presenting more possibilities of life, allowing us to see the life of the Chinese people, so as to re-examine their own lives and have more power to start anew.
Text丨Reporter He Jing
Picture丨Courtesy of the filmmaker
Editor: Gong Weifeng