"Long time no see", these are a few words often seen at this year's First Youth Film Festival.
Indeed, I haven't seen it for a long time, whether it's a movie or a film festival. In July, the Shanghai International Film Festival and the First Youth Film Festival opened almost simultaneously. If you consider whether there is a competition section and the degree of openness of related activities, the First Film Festival may be the most complete film event since the epidemic.
Those that belong to the film must be returned to the film, and see what films are worth seeing at this year's First Film Festival:
01 "The Lonely Island"
Every year, the First Film Festival has a training camp session. During the training camp, the selected young directors will complete a short film work under the guidance of their mentors. Luo Hongyi, La Tar, Mussen Makmabaf and Cai Mingming have all been mentors in previous training camps.
Because the training camp was not open to the media, I applied for the Zhihu "Camp Observer" and mixed into the training camp team, which was considered to witness the birth of this short film collection.
This year's mentor Cao Baoping set the theme as "isolated island". "In the old days, we had to retreat into divided, separated living quarters and spending more time with ourselves. Some hidden, imperceptible daily details and thoughts emerge. Cao Baoping explained the theme of "isolated islands" in this way.
Under this theme that fits the background of the times, seven directors and seven teams completed the shooting of seven short films in about ten days. Couples who have lost their daughters and taken the wrong urn in the chaos ("No Tears"),; the gloomy and desperate domestic violence marriage trapped in the "cave" ("Cave Love"),the daughter who lost her father during the epidemic ("The Place I Left"), the father who wants to flee the village to take care of his son's family ("Out of the Circle"),the daughter trapped in the "tunnel" isolated from her mother ("Outside the Tunnel"),the woman who risked her life to "make a date" ("37 degrees 2"),the train driver who ran aground on the road and could not go home ("Sleepy Beast"). Seven stories that look at different groups, different living conditions and different situations during the epidemic.
Slide from left to right, respectively, "No Tears", "Outside the Tunnel", "Cave Love", "Where I Left", "37 Degrees 2" Set (Picture from the FIRST Youth Film Festival Public Number)
The finishing of "Lonely Island" was much better than I expected, and the overall quality was higher than the previous bootcamp short films. Most importantly, this is perhaps the first film we've seen outside of news and documentaries related to the pandemic.
02
"Art Is Dead"
Since the stop-motion animation "Female Him", I have been paying attention to Zhou Shengwei, a somewhat strange post-90s director. Like "Art Is Dead" and "The Woman", it is difficult to define its genre, and some people even question whether it is a movie or not.
An artist named Liu Gang died, in a strange way. The death of the artist soon fermented on the Internet, news broadcasts, netizen discussions, spoof videos, ghost animal emojis spread everywhere. Houses, works, and even household garbage began to be noticed, displayed, and exploited, and mediocre works that might otherwise have been obscure began to haunt the auction market... When the death puzzle is solved, the interests and perspectives of all parties begin to shift.
The synopsis seems boring, but what is interesting is the director's shooting method. The reason why I have always been interested in Zhou Shengwei is that the study experience of Peking University has given him a strong theoretical background and speculative ability, and he can use popular culture and interactive art to lightly transform these profound but boring things into images.
"Art Is Dead" is more like a performance art carefully planned by the director, "I" (Zhou Shengwei) witnessed an artist's death, and the public followed "I" to find and walk into Liu Gang. Rather than being a made-up story, the director sets up situations that immerse everyone in and give real feedback. Most of the people who appear in the movie don't act, they are themselves. In addition to Liu Gang's death, several major plot points such as the secret of the paint plate are pre-designed, and most of the characters, stories and opinions that make up "Art Is Dead" are real.
It can be said that "Art Is Dead" is the hit of this year's First Film Festival, even so, Zhou Shengwei still does not feel that he belongs to the film circle. Whether it is his personality or his works, he does not know anything away from the mainstream film circle.
03 Love Poems
"Love Poems" was the biggest winner of this year's First Film Festival, winning two awards for Best Feature Film and Best Actor.
Every year, the First Film Festival has one or two particularly wild films, such as the previous documentary "Taming horses" and the "Fish Paradise" that has not been lost. This year's "Love Poems" directed by Wang Xiaozhen is also this one. It's an extremely simple and extremely complex film. Simply is the shooting conditions and methods, most of the scenes are in the car, starring Wang Xiaozhen himself and his real-life wife Zhou Qing. The complexity is the content, this is a movie with a play within a play, a play within a play, director Wang Xiaozhen let his wife help act, in this process, the two mixed into a lot of real life experience and contradictions, middle-aged people, marriage and the dilemma of the creator in the dialogue between the two unfolded layer by layer.
The viewing process of "Love Poems" is very interesting, because of this special form and character setting, many times you don't know which are the performances of the characters in the play, which are the performances of the actors, and which may be the real lives of the two actors. This kind of truth and falsehood makes the contradictions and marital dilemmas between the two more thoroughly revealed.
Are you being stunned? Yes, that's the fun of Love Poems.
04 Awesome! Juvenile》
This is also a documentary project that I have heard about for a long time, but I did not expect that the finished film would have such a good appearance and appeal.
A group of teenagers gathered on the outskirts of Beijing had the qualification to learn baseball, not because of talent and ability, but because of poverty and misfortune. Under the leadership of Zhang Jinxin and several other coaches, this group of teenagers who got together because of misfortune began to learn to play baseball, and coaches, families and themselves all hoped to change their fate by playing baseball. The children have different personalities, some are as stubborn and difficult to tame as sloppy, and some are gentle but lack courage like Xiaoshuang. Awesome! "Teenagers" uses the camera to record the growth and change of this group of children.
This is not a sports inspirational film, training, competition, inspiration, growth, but the director also crammed a lot of private goods in the camera, such as the problem of poor families in China, the imperfection of the social welfare system, strong economic development and real estate interests... "Great! The subject matter of "Teenagers" is already good, and the director is lucky to find such an excellent subject as Sloppy Xiaoshuang, and in the final editing stage, he packaged the story with a fairly commercial editing method. Compared to many independent documentaries, "Awesome! "Teenagers" is not so profound in terms of themes and problems exposed, but it is definitely a highly watched film.
05 Old Guo DreamWorks
What initially appealed to me was the subject matter of the documentary. A thirty-year-old man who had formed a band, and a few friends who studied dance and broadcast hosting, opened an art examination training class in his hometown. In small places, art test training and art are not half a cent relationship, but it is just a speculative act of students, parents, teachers and training institutions, trying to find a way for children with poor grades to go to college.
It can be seen from the finished film that the director and the protagonist of the story, Lao Guo, are very familiar, and in front of the camera, Lao Guo counts money, counts girlfriends, criticizes partners, fights competitors, and expresses his desire to make a lot of money by running art examination training classes. What does DreamWorks look like? Dilapidated classrooms, rehearsal rooms, students who look quite mediocre in congenital conditions. No one cares if they love art or not, and here, dance, art, broadcast hosting, and language are just like those outside the language, and they study purely for the sake of exams.
The director followed Lao Guo for several years and showed the local ecology of the art examination training very clearly. Unfortunately, too many shots are focused on Lao Guo, and the appearance of "DreamWorks" is a bit vague.
06 Coin
Song Siqi's last animated short film, "Sister", was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The director is good at using the form of stop-motion animation to show the growth state of the individual, or the post-80s and post-90s generation, and the symbols and details used are quite exquisite and accurate. This "Coin" can even be seen as a sequel to "Sister", a little girl who leaves her hometown and goes overseas to study alone. The director uses dumplings and coins that can bring good luck in dumplings as symbols of "home", and contrasts them with Western-style simple meals such as hamburgers and pizzas, vividly showing the delicate mind of the girl landing in a foreign land. This little animation is so smart, it's really enjoyable.
07 "Harif"
The film that won the Jury Prize is a little special. Everyone once joked that the dark horse named Harif in the movie could not qualify for a nomination for best actor. The film has two protagonists, one is an old herdsman who rescues a newborn dark horse, and the other is the black horse Ben Maharif. The whole movie does not have a choppy plot, but the story of the sold Harif who returns home in search of his master. But the director spends a lot of time telling the story from the horse's point of view, whether it is sadness, exhaustion, or happiness, loneliness, Harif's performance is quite in place, which may be the biggest attraction of the movie "Harif".
Every year, the First Film Festival has a section of films that tell the story of ethnic minorities, and when those grassland scenery, mountains and lakes appear on the outdoor big screen in downtown Xining, the contrast between tradition and modernity is quite magical.
08 "Rattle Bang"
A movie screened in the industrial field, it is said that after the first screening, word of mouth exploded, so there was a later screening.
In fact, the story of "Rattle Bang" is not amazing, a bit like "Kikujiro's Summer", or any road movie with children involved. The little boy Edamame who is going outside to find his father mixed with the middle-aged cargo man's car. One wants to find a father, the other wants to sell goods while looking for the enemy who indirectly killed his son, the relationship between the two from confrontation to détente, and then to the establishment of deep feelings later, the entire story direction is strictly designed according to the road genre film.
Interesting is the style and lifestyle of Northwest China, as well as the details of the interaction between the two, and the stubborn temper and humor of the Northwestern are quite accurate.
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