Original title: Hometown Captured My Heart From This time to the afterlife
"The First Parting" takes the life of Xinjiang boy Isa as a clue, telling the childhood story of him and Kylie Binur, a good friend of Qingmei Zhuma, and his affection for his sick mother. On February 17, 2019, "The First Parting" won the Grand Jury Prize in the New Generation section of the Berlin Film Festival.
More than a hundred years ago, the American anthropologist Morgan wrote in his book "Ancient Society": The Tarim River Basin is the cradle of world civilization, and if anyone finds the golden key left by the old man of history in Taklamakan, the door of world culture will be opened. Arnold Toynbee also said, "If life could happen again, I would like to be born in the Tarim Basin, because the four great civilizations of mankind meet there." "And I was fortunate enough to be born in the hinterland of Taklamakan, in the Shaya of Xinjiang in the Tarim Basin, and it determines the source of my films." Poplar wood is made into canoes, driving on the Tarim River, camel bells sound from the hinterland of Taklamakan, the rustling of poplar leaves for thousands of years, it is another life you never thought of, only in that kind of river, desert, Gobi, the vast wilderness outlined by poplar, can you feel the chaotic mathematics and vitality of the fierce wind that passes by, my childhood is derived from this land, it carries the sense of disorder of the wilderness.
I was born in the late 1980s and spent my entire childhood in the village of Kumutokay on the edge of Taklamakan. My childhood playmate and I lay under the red willow trees on the side of the road, waiting for a carriage to arrive, with red willow flowers on both sides of the road, and beyond that were large orchards, cotton fields and Gobi wastelands, and the air was full of the fragrance of mud and flowers. Hearing the sound of horses' hooves in the distance, the Uighur old man on the carriage would shout: "Naughty child, let my horse take you for a ride!" "The lonely old man will ask us to count how many of his beards there are, and we will carefully count the old man's beards, and the old man will reward us with grapes in the basket. There are often a group of prime-aged palm falcons riding by on horses, leaving us and dust behind, and at that moment we also imagine growing up to ride a horse. Looking back now, in my childhood, I was born with a wind-like childhood, I sat on the desert at night, watching the shooting stars in the night sky, listening to the words of the night and the words of the trees, and occasionally sitting behind my father's bicycle and walking the streets to take pictures.
My adolescence was a different state than my childhood, when I went to school in the county, and now I think back on it was a lonely and unconfident time, but fortunately, during that time, reading allowed me to discover another world. I still remember when I was a teenager, I found the complete works of Sanmao in the library of the county town, found Tarkovsky's "Carving Time", found Zhang Ailing, Aitmatov's complete works, Hardy, Rumi, Neruda and so on. Literature has given me another vast world of freedom, abstract and figurative but so fascinating. In the language class, we ate fifty cents of burnt cake to discuss "Dream of the Red Chamber", discussed the imagery of poetry, and were also busy selecting drafts for the "Sand Jujube Flower" literary club, and we also remembered that a classmate wrote his own poetry collection, and we all tried to write our own novels, but now it seems that most of us are the pretentious works of self-fantasy and imitation in our youth.
When I was in college, I had the opportunity to take a green-skinned train to a strange place, to gaze at the mountains and rivers, to feel different customs and customs, perhaps only by walking on the ground one foot at a time, it would produce distant distances and thoughts, and all walking could ultimately help me understand my hometown. Returning to my hometown again after adulthood, I feel that poetry and beauty are its core, I am also the precious experience of hindsighted individuals, personal experience should be the instinctive state of creation, for the director's attitude to see the world is your way of making movies, I began to learn to see the world in my own way.
Cinema is no less unique than literature, it has all kinds of possibilities. I had never been formally trained in film, and when I made "The First Parting," I didn't realize what kind of movie it would be, I just looked for my childhood experience based on my own upbringing, and this childhood experience was still alive and well.
In a sense, "The First Parting" is not a normative work of audiovisual language in the general sense, but it comes from the true expression of the heart. The experience of shooting is a kind of self-discovery for me, and it also prompts me to form my own film belief, at least for me who entered the world of images from documentaries, the work is not produced in self-fantasy, but in the place where "I" meet the "world", which reflects the world I live in and my thinking. I think the ideal film is documentary, not a documentary of the shooting method, how to sincerely reconstruct and tell the way of life, in my opinion this is the way for the film to go, just as realism is not particularly important, its value comes from how we interpret and represent it. I hope to be able to see the poetry of daily life, to break through the barriers of linear logical thinking, and to reproduce the subtlety and depth, complexity and truth of life.
How did the theme and story of The First Parting come about? The possible answer is that it is born out of the chaos of all people, it is not to record a completed thought, but the formation of an idea, and the difficulty is to find the material provided by reality and find a way to sort out the clues from it. Art is not logical thinking, nor can it form a set of behavioral logics, but it can reflect certain preconditions of belief, as Brock said: "The poet creates harmony from chaos." "Everyone gave the answer in their own way. Before filming "The First Parting", I spent a year tracking and shooting people, and the most intuitive feeling for me was that film art can use any facts scattered in time, and can use everything in life to organize the material provided by reality in time and carve real time in images. I once filmed a footage of Isa's father going to school to find Isa, which was very moving, and the character's behavior logic, feelings, and explosiveness were very accurate and just right. These experiences became the storyline and performance method of "The First Parting".
Looking back now, a year of documentary filming was particularly important for the birth of "The First Parting", and the way the script was constructed in the way of making a documentary was particularly luxurious but also precious. The precious things that cannot be replaced in the film are not outside of daily life, but hidden in the details of daily life. Observing the details of life, the seemingly simple and bland plot can also become a movie, and many of the details and dialogues in "The First Parting" come from a year's observation. For example, the scene of the family meeting in the film is based on the necessary assumptions of the story structure, but ultimately comes down to the reality and concrete facts of life.
"The First Parting" chose to shoot from the perspective of a child because of a similar childhood experience in my own experience, which has a sense of resonance. More importantly, children have a more liberal outlook on life, their perspective is very intuitive, they do not describe the world, but discover the world, they rarely think about their own appearance and voice in front of the world, they do not pay attention to conventions and traditions, and the way of looking at problems always gives you unexpected surprises and natural frankness. For example, in the film, KailiBinur's brother asked me "Are you nervous about the exam tomorrow", and he replied: "I don't care, the exam is by luck." Later, this sentence was also used in the lines of "The First Parting". I was amazed by his answer, and I always reminded myself that when I face children, I must shoot with more respect than adults.
"The First Parting" is actually not filming, it is filming atmosphere and emotions, I do not pay attention to the ups and downs of the plot, the conflict and beginning and end of events. I've always been interested in people's inner worlds – and for me, it's even more important to show the soul that reflects the nourishment of life, literature, and culture. For example, Kelly Binur's father sang the song he wrote when he divorced his wife in the cotton field, the entanglement between people, the unusual emotions, creating a vaguely painful poetic beauty, fragile warmth and longing, Kelly's mother's shy face like a girl flashed in the movie, I was always moved by such moments.
When I wrote this, "The First Parting" became a thing of the past, and when I set out to shoot this film, my hometown quickly and effectively grabbed my heart, and I have been there ever since.