Director Wang Lina said that "The First Parting" is a long poem dedicated to her hometown and childhood. The pictures in this article are all stills of the film. (Photo/Photo courtesy of the interviewee)
Wang Lina gathered the wind between the desert and the oasis, and in the distance came a song, which sang: "Friends from afar, how should I welcome you, should I lay a silver carpet or a gold carpet to welcome you?" ”
Fellow musician friends quickly wrote it down. The gold carpet and silver carpet in the folk song are metaphorical to the desert under the sun and the desert under the moonlight. Later, the musician's song was composed, "There is no crossroads on the Gobi Desert, and the sun and moon are the only street lights." "The sun and moon were inspired by that desert.
Shaya County, on the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, was a must-see place for east-west trade routes in ancient times, where different civilizations collided. Wang Lina said that people there sang it like a poem. Once, Wang Lina walked into a poplar forest, greeted an old man, and sang softly: "The birds in the city are black, and the birds in the poplar forest are white... The rustling of the thousand-year-old poplar tree sees through the world. ”
Wang Lina's film "The First Parting" also has such a scene, in a cotton field, a Uighur family is picking cotton, and his father is excited and sings.
"The First Parting" will be released on July 20, 2020, the first day of the theater's resumption of work, and the film also happens to be covered with "golden carpets" and "silver carpets" from Xinjiang to welcome the audience who re-enter the theater. After 175 days of closure, Chinese mainland cinemas have finally resumed work, which may be the longest "parting" of people leaving cinemas since there were cinemas. "We've felt so much parting this year that it seems like uncertainty has become the norm. I hope this movie can heal the people who come to watch it. Wang Lina told Southern Weekend reporters.
Wang Lina said that "The First Parting" is a long poem dedicated to her hometown and childhood. The protagonists of the story are children of two Uighur families in Shaya County, Aksu Region, Xinjiang. Isa was born into a family that was not wealthy, her mother was ill, unable to take care of herself, and often lost her life. Isa has an older brother who is in high school and has a busy schoolwork and a father who has a busy job but a meager income. So the responsibility of caring for her mother sometimes falls to isa, a schoolboy. Isa had to take extra care of her mother outside of school. Kelly is a good friend of Isa's, and they talk to each other about their troubles, climb poplar trees together, and raise a lamb together. But Kelly's Chinese grades were not good, and her parents planned to send her to a better Chinese school in Kucha.
Poplar trees are not bad for thousands of years, but childhood is beautiful and short. Isa's brother is going to a technical school in a distant place, and Kelly is going to Kucha Chinese School. They have to face the "first parting" in their lives that will eventually come. Wang Lina captures children's movements and details, but reflects a universal emotion. "Look at some of the things you experience in life through your child's perspective. These things are like life itself, it is not a straight line. I hope to see the frustration of daily life through the lens, to break through the barriers of 'straight lines', and to reproduce the complexity and depth of life itself. ”
Ten years after leaving home, Wang Lina found that the children in the village were still like when she was a child, not too fond of indulging in mobile phones and televisions, but more into animals, nature, and play with their partners.
<h3>In ten years, record the growth of children in their hometown</h3>
Shaya is Wang Lina's hometown. Wang Lina,whose father is from Gansu, came to Shaya County in Xinjiang in the 1970s as a village photographer, riding his bicycle around and taking pictures of people in various villages. After a long time, I made my home in Shaya County and lived with the locals.
Wang Lina was born in 1987, and she remembers that when she was a child, her father would take her to take pictures, and people in nearby villages knew their families. The oasis scenery on the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert has long been etched in her mind. Maybe it's for this reason, when she came back home with the camera and said she was going to make a movie, no one in the village felt strange, "To them, I'm not an interloper." "Although the film is full of exotic landscapes, it is far from the expression of curiosity, and many shots have a documentary-style rough texture.
In the beginning, Wang Lina really wanted to make a documentary. At that time, she will graduate from the Communication University of China with a master's degree and needs to do a graduation work. She thought of her hometown. "There's something you want to express no matter what." Every time I returned from Beijing to Shaya's hometown, my vision and sense of smell changed along the way, the sunlight leaking between the leaves of mulberry trees and poplar trees, the sweet smell of mulberry wafting in, and the cooking smoke in the village, as well as cattle and sheep, "a long-lost smell". And of course there's the distance between people, the kids who walk on the road after school, or the kids who climb on trees..." My hometown is like a thick thick branch. She said. Like her brother in the film, she went to a foreign country in college, and a graduate student went to Beijing and left her hometown.
Wang Lina set herself a documentary shooting cycle of ten years. Making a documentary cannot be rushed, it takes time to precipitate. She chose three families, three children, and wanted to spend ten years to see how the children had grown up in this place. Isa and Kelly are the protagonists in her documentary. In her first year, she cut out a 40-minute film as her graduation work. "As a student who spends more than a year making a documentary, its weight is not enough in my heart, from the perspective of handing in homework, it is still more attentive."
Counting forward, Wang Lina left her hometown to go to school in other places, and when she returned to her hometown, it was almost ten years. In the past ten years, the hometown has changed, the village has paved new asphalt roads, and the "new rural construction" has made the countryside look new. But she found that the children in the village had not changed. They are still as close to nature as she was when she was a child, and they don't like to indulge their time in mobile phones and televisions, but more in animals, nature, and play with their partners. "If you go to town, it may be different again, but I just go back to the countryside and see that's what it is."
In the first year of shooting material, Wang Lina sorted them into text materials, which amounted to 600,000 words. A year of tracking and shooting made her feel like a relative with her subjects. Wang Lina had the idea of organizing these materials and writing a feature film. The protagonists of the feature film are still these children, and their names are based on their real names. Although the inspiration for the story also comes from the documentary, not a single shot of the material saved during the documentary was cut into the feature film. "The format and equipment of the shooting are different."
The situation encountered in making a feature film is completely different from that of a documentary. As a director, Wang Lina needs the right lighting, sets, and of course, new lines. Once, the extras who had contacted in advance lost the sheep at home on the day of filming, and the shooting plan was delayed. There are also impromptu performances of young actors, whose expressions often surprise her. "Movies, it's like a collision of one cloud and another." Wang Lina, who is making a feature film for the first time, gradually realizes the importance of chance in filming, which may be an understanding that every young director will experience.
After the color grading, the color of the film is extremely intense, which is closer to the Xinjiang in Wang Lina's mind.
<h3>"Xinjiang is such a color</h3>."
The childhood in the film also has a shadow of Wang Lina herself. Childhood in Wang Lina's memories is a carefree look, once she went to school, the bag, did not bring textbooks, filled with corn, she carried corn at school for a day, the teacher did not blame. Another time, the classmate who always took the first place in the primary school class took the second place, and cried in a hurry, and Wang Lina, who always took the second to last test, ran to comfort him...
She knew that Kelly and Isa, like her, had grown up in this land and might slowly experience the grind of society in the future, but they would always have "that kind of power" from nature. She ingests a lot of natural scenes in the film, the desert, the poplar forest, the flock, and it seems that they are also the protagonists of the film. "I want to use my lens to present a period of human life, to show the special and direct feelings that I naturally gave me when I was a child. So when I go back to see these children, I feel like my childhood time is still alive in the present. ”
It is precisely for this reason that the color of the film picture is extremely intense, yellow and golden, blue and blue, and the traces of late color grading are very obvious. Perhaps in the eyes of some viewers, such colors sometimes seem unnatural, but in Wang Lina's heart, this is the color of Xinjiang. When the film was shot, the grayscale format was used throughout the film, in order to make the post-grading more tolerant.
"Have you been to Xinjiang?" Wang Lina opened her mobile phone photo album to the Southern Weekend reporter, "You see, this is the scene of my village. It's such a color, such a halo, such a water. It's the heat of the desert, it's the time of the snow. The tone of the film after the color grading is obviously closer to the Xinjiang in Wang Lina's mind. Wang Lina's mobile phone case image is a statue of the Thousand Buddhas Cave in Kyzyl. The Cave of the Thousand Buddhas of Kyzyl is about a hundred kilometers north of her house.
"If I had a child, I would send him into nature and let him learn to get along with animals and learn to make a thing by hand. I think this is the most important. Childhood is a critical time to live with nature and with the forest. And, let him see more of the other worlds. Wang Lina arranged the "role" of "little lamb", and between the child and the lamb, there is an emotional bond that the adult world cannot understand. The fate of this little lamb in the film has always touched the nerves of the audience.
Wang Lina now lives in Beijing, but she returns to Shaya many times a year. Beijing flew to Urumqi to transfer the hangar car, then took the bus to the county seat of Shaya, and then transferred to the home. Although the road is tortuous, she feels that returning to Xinjiang will be a state of relaxation. "In Beijing, good friends can go to the movies and go to the archives. People I meet always talk about ideals and what to do next", but in my hometown, people talk about life, "friends will say to me, today's mulberries are ripe, let's go pick mulberries." The messages he gave me on WeChat were 'Where are you, I'm under the grapevine of whoever, you come over for a drink'. ”
"The First Parting" was shortlisted for the Asian Future section of the Tokyo Film Festival in 2018, followed by the New Generation section of the 2019 Berlin Film Festival. Wang Lina still remembers the reaction of the audience at the festival at that time. There was a screening in Berlin, and the whole audience was full of children, "they came to the movie, they wanted to know if the friendship of the children was still there, whether the lamb was still there, all their attention was on the little animals, the little friendship."
"When I was a child, I was so close to nature and friends, and when I grew up, I kept experiencing parting, and I felt that it was universal." When she was in Tokyo, there were many old people who came to see the film, and she remembers an old man who said, "Thank you for letting me see such a beautiful place." Wang Lina felt that he could feel the emotions he wanted to express. When Kelly leaves the village, it is the emotional climax of the film, and Lamb, Isa, and Kelly have been separated ever since.
"Although it is a children's film, don't you yourself feel that the tone of the film presents a sad mood?" Wang Lina did not answer the question of the Southern Weekend reporter head-on, she said: "Through parting again and again, I have grown, I think it is probably a bit like this." I think life itself is full of all kinds of emotions, and there are also a lot of happy times in this film, and there are also the sadness in a child's heart when he has to leave. There must be such emotions in the film - aren't all films emotional? ”
When Wang Lina saw the children in her hometown, she suddenly felt that her childhood time seemed to be still alive in the present.
<h3>Missed the shooting time, the wheat is still growing</h3>
In January 2020, Wang Lina returned to her hometown to collect and sample her second film. The work began last year, and the title of the second film, tentatively "Village Music", tells the story of the hometown, the story of the old Uighur musicians who live in the Taklamakan Desert. After the outbreak of the epidemic at the end of January, Wang Lina could only stay at home and continue to polish the script.
In May, the national epidemic eased, and she thought that the film would be able to start shooting smoothly in June. In 2019, she planted a large piece of wheat in the field and wanted to wait for the wheat harvest in June to shoot. She successfully bred a female camel, and the due date is also set for June — in the new film she has to shoot the scene of the camel giving birth. But in June, the epidemic in Beijing escalated sharply, and the Beijing film crew was unable to come to Xinjiang. Camels and wheat were still growing freely, but they missed the opportunity to shoot.
In July, when the epidemic broke out in Xinjiang and caught up with the release of the film, Wang Lina stared nervously at the daily flight changes, and she was not sure if she could go out of Xinjiang to catch up with the premiere scene. "It's a pity that local audiences in Xinjiang can't see the premiere of this film."
Wang Lina said that her film is released at this moment, like a small flame. "Cinemas have to open their doors, and when they open doors, they need movies. Let this flame burn first. "Letting relatively small-cost literary and art films take the lead may be the result of the comprehensive consideration of the current production, distributors and theaters."
Wang Lina often mentions in interviews About Abbas's "The Taste of Cherries", a man who is about to commit suicide, who goes out and meets a group of children, who help them lay down the mulberries on the tree. As heaven had destined, he took a sip, and the sweetness of the mulberry shook his heart. He took the mulberry home, as if he had just made a long trip. "Sometimes life is like that." She said.
Southern Weekend reporter Wang Huazhen