The movie "Mom and Seven Days of Time" directed by Li Dongmei will be released on May 12, 2024, which is Mother's Day. Data map
Li Dongmei's movie has finally been released. In 2020, "Mom and Seven Days of Time" premiered at the Pingyao International Film Festival and won the Fei Mu honor for Best Film. In the cinema in Pingyao back then, many people left halfway, but there were also many people who were secretly wiping tears, and the audience gave polarized evaluations.
This film tells the story of Li Dongmei's extremely personal history of pain. Her mother died in childbirth when Li Dongmei was 12 years old, and as the eldest daughter in the family, she took on the responsibility of taking care of her four younger sisters. The film revolves around the seven days before and after the death of his mother, and uses long shots to record his mother's life and death in great detail. Under the naturalistic style that seems to have no dramatic conflict, Li Dongmei's painful perception of that memory is hidden.
Many film critics said that this was the most thorough implementation of the artistic concept at the Pingyao International Film Festival, and it was difficult to have such a resolute attitude towards the image if there was no strong inner emotion as support. The Gothenburg Film Festival in Sweden awarded her the award for Best Debut Film, named after Ingmar Bergman, with the citation saying: "Through candid expression and courageous minimalism, the director conveys a genuine emotion full of introspection, inviting all of us to feel it emotionally, intellectually and even instinctively." ”
In 2018, when Li Dongmei started writing the script of the film, she was already 37 years old. She said that for many years, this was a memory that she did not want to touch, to write, to shoot, it was a process of dissecting, dripping out, and healing.
On May 5, 2024, Li Dongmei posted a photo of 2019 on the circle of friends, which was the start-up ceremony of the crew. In the photo, there is an old man who has passed away, and the young actors have also grown up. The film chose to be released on this Mother's Day, which is her re-looking back at the wound that has grown new skin.
The following is director Li Dongmei's own account:
Step out of the heaviest time
The mother who is about to give birth (left) in the film. Data map
That night, I heard my little sister screaming in the dormitory, and I asked what was wrong, but she didn't answer. Then we all fell asleep.
The next morning, when it was still dark, I was combing my little sister's hair in the dormitory, and when I saw my aunt and uncle coming, I sighed in my heart, I knew that they would not come to see us in the dormitory. They told me at the time, "Your mother is sick, and now it's more serious, let's go see her." In fact, at that time, things had already happened, and it was that kind of "gluck" feeling. I was 12 years old.
This feeling lasted for seven or eight years, from the age of 12 to my twenties, and whenever I felt some kind of panic, it would be the mood at that time, that kind of "gurgle".
I'm from Wushan. The place where I was born is where I was born, and the place where I lived is shown in the movie, and there is almost no artistic embellishment.
When I was a child, my father worked outside the home, and only my mother was at home. I live on campus on weekdays, go home on weekends, and walk for two and a half hours. The roads filmed in the movie are the same roads I walked on when I was a child, the only difference is that they are now paved with cement and used to be dirt roads.
I've written two or three semi-autobiographical scripts before, but then I realized that in those scripts, I subconsciously blurred some things. For example, in one script, I erased the period before and after my mother's death.
Then I thought, why did I erase this time, was it because I was still scared at that time, or was it not so easy to face it? It was the most painful and heavy time in my life, and it had the greatest impact on my life, so I have never dared to touch it easily. Even for many years, I heard mourning, I saw someone die, I saw a pregnant woman, and I felt sadness, that natural sadness.
As I grew older, at the age of forty, I slowly felt that this thing was something I couldn't avoid in my life. "You've been on the run for so long!" I would say to myself. The part that I've been running away from, and it's what I really need to talk about, that I need to face—I'm going to write about what happened in the days before and after my mother's death, and I'm going to shoot it.
The script was written smoothly, without even any difficulties, and the structure was clear. I started writing at the end of 2018, and in less than half a year, I finished the first draft. Although it is my memory, but through the role of "Xiao Xian", it seems that Xiao Xian is experiencing this period of life, so I don't feel pain yet, and there will be the joy of creation, and there are a lot of beautiful things in it, literary things in it. When I read it, I also felt like I was reading someone else's story, maybe it was a kind of self-preservation.
But before the start of filming, when I was looking at the scene, my emotions quickly failed. That's the opening scene in the movie, the back of the little girl. That's the road I walked for six years from the age of 6 to 12, the same way I went to elementary school. I think the human body has memories, maybe you have forgotten it yourself, but in those times, there was a connection between your body and the land, and everything around you, and this connection suddenly appeared after nearly 30 years. This feeling is rushing to my face, it makes me panic all of a sudden, it's a subconscious, physical memory, and you can't control it with your consciousness.
Later, the official shooting, the girl turned the book and read the book on the first day, which was the last quiet time before her world changed dramatically, and it was also a good memory of my childhood, so I stretched the camera very long and let her lie on the bed, like all girls, to feel the tranquility of that afternoon.
Later, there was a scene where I cried when I was telling the children about the play. After her mother died, Xiao Xian and her sister came back from school, and they saw her mother's body from the door, but they had not yet walked in. We didn't use this shot in the film, but it was an expression of facing death. At that time, I was in tears while directing the actors. I thought that if I didn't have the most honest conversation with them, my actors might not feel it, and they were so young, and I was going to take me out and let them see it.
In fact, when I shared my situation with them, it was also a healing and release for my own body and mind. I was borrowing their bodies to express my fear and longing. Later, when I heard mourning, I was not as sensitive as before, because when I was editing, I listened to it over and over again, and when I was shooting, I was shooting it over and over again. I think I've crossed the "hurdle" of mourning. Also, I was afraid of the word "death" before, but during the filming, I felt that I was releasing it little by little, and my feeling about the word became different.
In the film, the little sisters face the scene of life changes. Data map
Resolute and complete
Before I returned to my hometown to prepare for the start-up, the investor had a financial problem and couldn't get the money. I thought about disbanding the crew at the time, but my fourth sister said, "Sister, you don't have to worry. Then she mortgaged a Ping An insurance policy she bought, and in this way, the 155,000 yuan obtained from the mortgage started the movie "Mom and Seven Days of Time". When I was making a film, I spent most of my energy fighting with money, borrowing and borrowing in various ways.
The preparation time for the film was rushed, it was a feature film, and we only had nearly three months from preparation to filming – I used to have more than half a year to prepare for a short film. The filming period lasted for more than 30 days, except for the middle school scene, which was in other places, and almost the whole scene was filmed in the village. The actors in the movie are all from the local area, and the adults are from this village. The one who plays the grandfather is a distant relative of ours, and the one who plays the grandmother is also from the same village. I don't know some of them, but they all know my dad and know the roots.
My grandfather was a very kind man, he seemed gentle, hardworking, and maybe a little cowardly. I feel such an image from that "grandfather". As for "Grandma", I asked her that she had lost a child, so I felt that she would have an emotional resonance with the characters in the movie.
The team was basically improvised, with no money or experience, and the most lacking thing at that time was a producer. I think I only have 5% of my energy as a director, and 95% of my time as a producer and producer. But at that time, the actors were all selected, and I thought that if I didn't shoot this year, these children would change next year, and the little tiger teeth would grow, and the old people who were selected might also have changes, and our village would change very quickly, so I felt that I had to shoot.
This is my first time making a feature film. But I've always believed that the world we know is not all the world itself, and it's the same with movies, and there will be something "providential" during the filming process.
In the movie, there is a scene where my mother is sitting in the hall with my grandparents, and suddenly a butterfly lands on my mother's knee, and she dusts the butterfly away. I didn't arrange this scene, and the butterfly wasn't a special effect. At that time, we were filming, and there was a butterfly flying over, this mother had never acted, and she knew very little, and I was guiding her outside the picture, and I said you have to take this butterfly away from your lap, and if it doesn't fly, it's always there, and the audience can't see it, and I say let it stop and then take it away. Her movements at that time were very natural, and the whole feeling was very harmonious with that scene, and the feeling was also very good.
There is also a scene of my grandmother, which really touched my heart. That shot was my grandmother carrying a basket to cut vegetables and carry vegetables, but the basket was so heavy that she couldn't stand up if she wanted to. Before filming that morning, the grandmother, who played the grandmother, did a lot of farm work at home before coming to the set, so I think she was already very tired. We filmed that scene many times, and I remember 14 of them...... Her tiredness fits best with my script. My grandmother was very short, and when I was a child, I used to see my grandmother kneeling on the ground and grabbing something, trying to stand up, because the basket was too big, and she would fall back again...... There are no regrets about her "performance", I have a lot of regrets about this movie, but this scene does not.
In the "seven days" time in the movie, many things are happening repeatedly. Eating, walking, sleeping, all repeatedly. Perhaps the biggest keyword in this film is "day after day", that is, repetition, the life of ordinary people is like this, farming, cooking, eating, walking, sleeping. From home to the hospital, the sisters walked the mountain road repeatedly, and the long camera also kept filming their walking, and if I used a montage to suddenly cut the camera from home to the hospital, I thought it would break the rhythm in the film.
Many viewers will say why the footage of the film is so long, I hope that the audience knows the length of this time from the physical feeling, from the physical feeling, they eat for so long, you have to watch him eat for so long. The process of going from home to the hospital, the process of going home from the hospital, you also need to feel it physically, otherwise, you can't feel the hardships of being human, you can't feel the situation they were in at that time.
No matter what others say about me, I think it's really just an assignment, and it has a lot of imperfections. But it's definitely a sincere study, and its style is mature. When the Venice Film Festival sent me an invitation, it also used the word "mature". I feel that I have finished, in this film I have no temptation, no hesitation, it is resolute and complete, and it also conveys my understanding of the aesthetics of cinema very well.
The younger sister in the film takes care of her younger sister. Data map
"Why do you want to have a son?"
In "Mom and Seven Days of Time", there is a scene where Xiaoxian says to his father in front of his mother's grave: "Dad, I will be filial to you, like a son." "I vaguely remember saying that to my father at my mother's funeral.
When I was writing the script, I recalled that the last time I saw my mom was on a Sunday. We lived on campus at that time, and we had classes six days a week, and by the time she finally died, we hadn't had a holiday, so backwards, my mother was buried seven days after she died.
When I was younger, I just thought my mother was very melancholy, she didn't seem to be very happy, she didn't talk as loud and bright as other mothers. My mother's voice was slow, low, always quiet, and there was something not so happy in her eyes.
She barely smiled, and I can't remember any times she smiled when I was with her. Only once did her good friend come to our house and they were talking louder than usual while cooking. The two women were talking and maybe laughing while cooking in the kitchen, and my mother was what I liked very much at that time.
She married my dad at the age of 24 and became a mother at the age of 25 and gave birth to my eldest daughter. In the past 11 years, in addition to giving birth to our five daughters, she has actually been pregnant two or three times, but she has not given birth smoothly. Almost every year she was pregnant, and she wanted to have a boy.
She walked at the age of 36, had a difficult birth, and the placenta was stuck in her body. That day, several people carried their mother to the hospital in a distant town and trotted all the way down the mountain, but it was too late. In fact, the mother could give birth at her grandmother's house, which was closer to the hospital, but at that time, the village custom believed that it was unlucky for a woman to give birth to a child in her mother's house.
By the time I was 36 years old, I often thought about her and her things. I've lived a little longer than she did.
When it comes to having a son, I don't think my dad is simply patriarchal. Of the four children in my grandfather's generation, there is only one son, who is my grandfather. My grandfather has only one son below my father, and when it comes to my father, there is only a daughter below. My dad actually lived in such a framework, and he was confined to it. Grandpa had this idea for him: We have three generations of single transmission, and when we come to you, you must continue the incense, so my father is under pressure.
Actually, my dad spoiled me very much and was very good to us. He wants his son to care more about a thing in terms of reputation, rather than how dissatisfied he is with his daughter, and he doesn't think girls are bad. So I didn't express my father's thoughts too much in the movie, but "I" thought a lot as a daughter, and I wanted to be a boy myself.
Then I decided to study film, my dad and my family gave me a lot of freedom, I grew up feeling that I could do whatever I wanted, and I didn't feel restricted. I was our first local college student, and at that time, I was assigned to Sichuan University of Foreign Chinese and then I was assigned to teach junior high school in the town closest to our village for four years, which is the town in the movie. At first, I taught Chinese, and later English.
I did have a dream of being a teacher when I was a kid, and now it's come true. At that time, I would think if I should do something else, and I was still tormented by a lot of things, and I couldn't live that life very peacefully. So I quit my job and started my own business for my sisters to go to graduate school, and I also wanted to earn tuition for something more in the future. I think back now that maybe it had something to do with my father's tolerance of me as a child, who made me feel like I could do what I wanted.
After the mother left, the father did not show up for seven years. He was out making money to pay off his debts, and he was also having a hard time. I am the eldest daughter, I have to take care of the lives of my younger sisters, they are the same as me, their personalities will be stronger, maybe they are like me, when they were young, they wanted to ask their mother a question: "Why do you want to have a son?" "They all have their own careers now, as kindergarten principals, lawyers or educators for children with special needs, but we rarely talk about this experience as children.
This time the movie was going to be released, and my father said he could help with a lot of things, but he said he couldn't go to see the movie.
I went back to my hometown the other day and went to my mother's grave. I sat next to her grave and felt peaceful looking at the scenery and mountains opposite. My mother's resting place was like a wound that had healed and had grown new skin.
The film's direct presentation of the loss of his mother at an early age. Data map
"Your Own Voice"
I was 31 years old when I went to Australia to study film. The graduate school of directing at the University of Melbourne is two years, and I have zero foundation, so I am afraid that the graduate school will not be solid, so I went to study for an undergraduate, which is equivalent to a total of eight years of undergraduate study before and after. The degree is not so important, and it is not to go to a university to be a teacher, and I have studied for a long time.
Going to Australia to study was also an accidental chance. I met a marine biologist in Australia. One day he saw me taking pictures and said, "I think you are a very quiet person when you take pictures, why don't you learn photography?" ”
I think photography is too difficult for technical things, and I don't have the talent for it. But the director seems to be able to, the director can ask someone else to do the cinematography, and I can just tell the story.
For the directing major of Kaomo University, you need to have a short film work. The work I gave was a 4-minute short film about a love story, called "So am I", which is actually about the inner world of people, and the ending line is that the man says "I know you are friend", and then the woman says "So am I". In fact, these things in our emotions stem from a kind of fear and anxiety about uncertainty. Because of this film, the people at the film school gave me the nickname Dongmei Ka-Wai, Wong Kar-wai, and they thought the film had a very Wong Kar-wai feel.
I'm not a movie fan, and I didn't watch more than 50 movies before I went to film school, but I prefer to write. Because I used to study English and American literature in my country, I would like to write. When I first went to film history, many people didn't know the name, but when I saw Ozu's Tokyo Story and Robert Bresson's Muschet, I felt as if I was particularly fond of it. Ozu is the director who depicts the details and trivial things of life most vividly.
There is also Tarkovsky's "Mirror", which has a dreamy feel. What I learned from Tarkovsky was what kind of things are worth expressing in film. If you can write a book and communicate in words, then why must you express it in film?
My view of cinema is like this, where language and words can't reach, there will be movies, otherwise you don't use movies to do it. So my lines will be very few. Cinema is a feeling that you can't tell, and it gives you an experience that no other thing can bring you, so you can only make movies. I think the film is vague and ambiguous, and if a film doesn't have these, doesn't have that kind of thing that words can't reach, then the movie is not worth making.
The most important thing we learned in film school was to think visually as much as possible. So the few short films we shot earlier are not allowed to have lines, and we are not allowed to have text. I remember when I was in the first grade, my first short film was shot with a super 8mm film camera (Super Eight), and the teacher asked us to tell a story with ten shots, no lines, no music, nothing else.
In this way, we made nine short films at the film school, and we became directors step by step. In the directing department of the University of Mexico, our production method is very Hollywood, but our screenwriting model is not Hollywood, it wants us to dig more into some things in our hearts, so it does not teach us the ability to eat, but let us do artistic expression. It will always ask: what do you want, how do you feel, how do you express time and space? It repeatedly emphasizes your own voice, be sure to "your own voice". At that time, every time we finished writing the script, 14 people in the class sat in a circle, and everyone came to read what they had written, and every time I wanted to read it, the teacher said that everyone should be ready, and they should be given tissues.
When we graduated, we were still each of us, and the only change may have been in the audio-visual language, but it protected my very personal nature as a "Dongmei". If you watch "Mom and Seven Days", you may be able to understand where that thing comes from, it is always a very selfish thing.
It is precisely because of these very ego things that make this film very much like durian, which may be a delicious thing for some people, but for others, he goes into the cinema, sees it, and leaves, even if it is only for 10 minutes, he is like tasting durian, and he has left a taste in his heart that he doesn't like. But this has created a meaning, and that meaning is that there has been such an expression in the world.
Southern Weekly reporter Wang Huazhen and Southern Weekly intern Dong Jiadi
Editor-in-charge: Liu Youxiang