"Swim Until the Sea Turns Blue" is a documentary directed by Jia Zhangke.
The whole film is divided into eighteen subsections, which record the life experiences of four well-known writers, Ma Feng, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong, in the form of interviews.
Follow the director's calm shots, trying to find the deep ideas of the film, rural literature writers Fathers Destiny Run away History...
The director let us know about the writer Ma Feng through the old man of Jiajia Village and Ma Feng's daughter.
Jiajia Village used to be a poor and backward village. Because of the problem of water quality, the land in Jiajia Village is saline and alkali land, and it is impossible to grow crops, the villagers have difficulties in living and the economy is backward. The girls outside are reluctant to marry, many people in their own villages have gone out to escape, and many of the young men who stayed behind could not find their daughters-in-law and had to beat bare sticks.
Later, in the early days of liberation, the writer Ma Feng gave up the comfortable life in Beijing and returned to his hometown to experience life. He led everyone to solve the problem of salinization of the land with scientific methods, so that grain could be grown in the field and the lives of the villagers were improved. The grain grown in Jiajia Village is better than that in the eight townships of Ten Miles, and there have been bumper harvests year after year.
He also brought advanced ideas to his hometown, encouraging young people to love freely.
Because of these experiences, Ma Feng personally published a large number of literary works on rural themes. With his important achievements in literature.
It can be said that this land nourished him.
The camera shifts to the study of Jia Pingwo in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province. The dialogue between Jia Pingwo and his daughter Jia Qianqian is also intriguing.
"Before becoming a poet, first of all, we must be a good person, be a wife, a mother, write poetry, don't poetry."
"It doesn't matter if you're a good daughter."
This is where we see a generous father, a grounded writer [cute] [cute] [cute]
Jia Pingwa was born in a mountain village in Shangluo, Shaanxi. When he was in school, the Cultural Revolution began, and his father was beaten as a counter-revolutionary and sent back to his hometown for reform.
Influenced by his father, it seems that he has no chance to go to school, and he cannot go to school, and the village recruits geological workers, and people do not want him. Recruit road workers, and don't want him.
But he did not accept defeat, did not admit his fate, and tried to play to his advantages and find opportunities for himself. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was finally recommended to go to university and entered the city of Xi'an.
He can write and write, and from studying at university to going to work, he has written a lot of works. Novels, essays, poems, plays... He could write, but he felt that none of this was what he wanted.
In the 1980s, he decided to go back to his hometown and ask two or three of his friends to ride their bicycles to the countryside every day.
He said that this period was a period of time when he gained the most and brought him great pain. Because the medical equipment in the countryside was so poor, he contracted the hepatitis B virus during a cold injection, which took him 15 years to cure the disease.
This period of time also gave him inspiration to create. Created a large number of works. Among them, the novels "Chicken Nest People's Home" and "Impetuous" have won many awards. It enabled him to open a new era on the road of literary creation. Laid the direction of his creation, based on his hometown to see China and the world.
Yu Hua, as soon as he saw him, seemed to see the clouds open and fog dispersed [cute] [cute] [cute]
This positive, optimistic, humorous and funny talent, his life is not smooth.
When he was a child, he followed his parents to settle in Haiyan, Zhejiang.
His parents worked in the hospital, and his family lived opposite the morgue, often waking up in the middle of the night by the cries of his dead relatives.
Haiyan weather is too hot, for cool in the morgue nap.
Failed the college entrance examination twice and was forced to become a dentist. He didn't like the job, looking at other people's open mouths all day long, thinking it was the least scenic place [tears] [tears] [tears]
Dissatisfied with this life, he began to write. Keep submitting, getting rejected...
He was not discouraged, and finally one day, he succeeded, from a person who was rejected to a person who was asked to write by the editorial department, and he was proud [likes] [likes]
Yu Hua said that he has liked to swim since he was a child, and the sea water he sees is obviously yellow, why does the book say that the sea is blue? He swam all the way until the water turned blue.
It's a persistence, a belief, and he did it[ like] [like] [like]
He said that he had already settled in Beijing, and when he wrote, he would return to Haiyan, and only in his hometown would he have the inspiration to create? [Cute] [Cute] [Cute]
Liangzhuang, Henan, the hometown of writer Liang Hong.
In a small tailor's shop, she quietly tells the hardships of her childhood. The mother is paralyzed in bed, responding every day with silent tears to her child's farewell before school. Mention of mother she choked up several times, mother is the shadow of her life [tears] [tears]
Because of her family's difficulties, she could not afford to pay the tuition, and she was punished to stand outside the classroom to listen to the lecture, and she did not feel humiliated.
The father took the child from house to house to borrow money to pay for the tuition, a dime and a dime...
The eldest sister prematurely carried the burden of the family forward, and the communication between the eldest sister and her father was deeply moving, and she realized the difficulty of life.
It is such a hard life that gives the child the motivation to move forward, she went to graduate school for a doctorate, completed the turning point of her life, got married and had children, and lived a comfortable life.
She felt that something was wrong, what she wanted was not such a life, so she returned to Liangzhuang, and her father took her from house to house, so she had the Liangzhuang trilogy. It was her hometown that gave her another boost to her life.
The four writers in the film all have a deep relationship with the countryside, literature changes their fate, let them leave their hometown, and literature makes them look back at their hometown and write about their hometown in their own pen.
With a plain lens, the director lets us see the melancholy of the changing times and the persistence of pursuing a better life.
Swimming until the water turns blue should be our common hope.