In 22 days, the 21st World Cup will open in Russia.
It so happened that young director Zhou Quan's debut film "Summer in the West Creek", which is also a film related to the World Cup, let us dream back to 1998, this film will be released on May 25.
Twenty years have passed since the 1998 World Cup in France. One of the films about this World Cup is the World Cup on the Mountain (aka The Little Lama Watches the World Cup) from Bhutan, directed by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.
Every World Cup has made the earth tremble, and even the little lamas of the snow-capped Himalayas, which are considered peaceful and distant, have been affected. They escaped from the temple and went down the mountain to watch the game, raised funds to buy television sets to watch live television, and their fanatical strength was no different from that of ordinary beings.
In the face of "World Cup on the Mountain", it is difficult to judge the enthusiasm of a group of lamas on the roof of the world to watch the World Cup, and the troubles and joys that come to their lives because of the dichotomy of East, West, colonization, postcoloniality, civilization, barbarism, first world, third world, center and edge. If you arbitrarily summarize their lives with the imagination that "on the roof of the world, there lives a group of lamas, they live in an indisputable and peaceful life, and the arrival of the World Cup has changed their lives", it immediately seems arbitrary and narrow.
Similarly, for Xiaoyang, a ten-year-old teenager in Xixiaohe, southern China, this summer, in addition to the exciting World Cup in France, there are also the waves of his young life:
The loneliness of growing up alone, the "secret" of the neighbor's grandfather, the "interlude" of his parents' feelings, the death that he can't fully understand, the separation that he can't fully understand.
Even if there is no World Cup, as long as a person is growing up, there will be growing pains. Cinema is a way of relieving and a way of remembering.
Almost every director's debut is related to his own life experience, some directors return to childhood, looking for the warmth that survives in the great changes of the times; some directors talk about cruel youth and self-exile, such as "Sunny Day", such as "Dream Traveler". More directors have chosen to return to their hometown to shoot their debut films, Jia Zhangke's Fenyang and Zhang Ming's Wushan.
Zhou Quan, who studied film in the United States, returned to his hometown of Shaoxing and filmed his feature film debut "Summer of Xixiaohe".
Fortunately, his debut works have the appearance of Taiwanese film emperor actor Gu Baoming and mainland powerful actors Tan Zhuo and Zhang Songwen, as well as the support of industry celebrities such as Zhang Jiazhen, Liao Qingsong and Lin Qiang.