Indie, Sunflower, Film--Works--Film: Thesunflowers
THE SUNFLOWERS
1. A Synopsis of the film
This film is narrated by a singer, YANG YI, a famous wandering folk singer in real life in China today. He once sat and sang at streets of Beijing all day long, and taken into custody by police several times. But after freedom, he sat there again. His songs mostly express the feelings of the have-nots, the helpless. He wrote and performed 4 folk songs and all melodies for this film, just with a guitar and a harmonica.
With unpretending narrative style and a 5-chapters structure: Laboring, Appearing, Xiao Qian, A Mei and Reoccurring, the film tells a story about an accidental rape affair:
Several years ago, Ma Xiaogang, an orphan in a town of West in China, raped a girl, A Mei, a teacher of an elementary school, at a great sunflowers field. He was put in jail. When he was free and came back to the town, he became a taciturn man. No one knew his secret. With help of a good old policeman, He ran a little shop at Shadow Mountain Street to make and sell roasted sunflower-seeds, willing to wash off the guilty by working hard. Sometime, when he was not busy, he dated with Zhang Xiaoqian, a naive girl who loved him: going to cinema, having a walk, sitting outside the door to listen the casual guitar of the wandering singer. Time went slowly and leisurely.
But every time when he passed by that field, the blooming sunflowers reminded him of the past, the days full of desire and love to that girl, A Mei. He began to imagine and imagine her life of today. Where she was? How was her life? With strong curiosity, he sent some letters to her old address, never expecting them can get to her.
One day, a strange woman called in on his shop. She was A Mei. So they met again. But how they get along with each other? In his eyes, she has changed a lot, not being a pure girl like before. Finally he decided to love her, with deep regrets. But she did not understand at all. It made him a little desperate, also let him blame himself much more.
One day, they came to the great sunflower field again. In sight of the setting sun, they burst to love and rushed into sunflowers…After that, they sat there for a long time, quietly and numbly. Finally, A Mei was gone, only with a brokenhearted word left: "the whole damn world has changed after all. " Night was falling, and Ma Xiaogang was back home too, at loose ends. He sat in his room all night. The next day and the next night, he was in the sunflower field again, with a sickle in the hand. He stood there so long and so long, suddenly, began to chop the sunflowers crazily……
Morning was coming at the Shadow Mountain Street, the na?ve girl was coming too, but the poor boy was never been there again. In sight of all of the scenes, our lonely singer carried his guitar and pack, leaving this town forever.
2. Director's notes
The sunflowers is my first feature film. This is an idyllic folk movie. The story is narrated by a folk singer, YANG YI, a famous wandering singer in China. He wrote and performed 4 folk songs and all music for this film with a guitar and a harmonica. The simple style of his singing gives the movie some deep feelings and impressions. So we call it a 'folk movie', a rural sight and sound, as beautiful and natural as a sunflower blooming in soil.
With unpretending narrative, the film tells a story about a boy set free after six years prison: his desire, his love, and his despair. The simplicity of setting and acting, the poetry of 5-chapters structure, the easygoing rhythm of story-telling, the silence of the whole movie, make an idyllic aesthetics of the work. This film needs absorbed attitude to view, you must devote some emotion to it, and you'll get more.
The film was shot in west of China, at foot of Shadow Mountains, where there are lots of sunflowers blooming all over. They gave the film a western style and symbolistic mode. In this film, all actors are non-professional, who are student, teacher, football coach, worker of repair-store in the village, manager of cinema in town, wandering singer and so on. They have affecting faces and expressions to reflect China today's reality, the living of depressing and despairing. But happiness is there too: to sit in the sun and sell seeds.
Narrative:
Though the story is an innermost, secret affair, it slowly tells with a skill of a suspense movie, like Hitchcock's. Firstly, a boy came, wrote and sent several letters, we can't find what he wanted to do. Then a girl in the town came and loved him, they went to cinema, he was upset a little. Then a strange woman came, we knew a little, but not very sure. Finally they went to the sunflowers field, and disappeared into it. At that time, all the things were there: the past, the secret, the desire and the hurt. In my mind, more important than this secret in the film, it is the hero's daily life, his labor, his leisure, his face in the sun and shadows. So we must fix our eyes-or camera's eyes-on this sunny street, on this poor boy's face, on that na?ve girl's hands-there is a little sunflower which would be put in the door of the absent country boy.
Image:
In the present tense, the image will be in cold tone, implying the hero's peaceful mind, and his loneliness; at the same time, it will be a little of overexposure, just like the sunny street and the sunny sunflowers' look: shadows and sunlight, implying the boy's upset. In the past tense, the image will be in warm tone, brilliant and exciting, implying the hero’s young and ardent love. All this disposals especially exhibited in the sunflowers of the two tenses. Besides, the camera's movements have two styles: in the past, unstable; in the present, stable
Act:
All the actors will be non-professional. We need them naturally coming and going, speaking and smiling. They have little lines to learn, I didn’t prepare more in the script. More often, they must say them out in their own way, just like in real life; if they can't say naturally their lines themselves, all they can do is: shut up. So we get a nearly silent movie. I like it. And this film hasn't sex, violence, comedy, tragedy. It has nothing, except sitting there, bicycling there, running and pausing there, finally, being put into trance there.
Sounds & Music:
The most of sounds in this movie are silence, except sounds of wind in sunflowers field, of motorcycles in the afternoon, of footsteps out of the door, of un-discerned things in the street at night. Some of them came from the hero's mind, with super-realistic style.
The music and the songs have the same origin: the wandering singer sitting all day long across the street. Sometimes he wasn’t there, but he didn't go too far away; in the whole story, he was omnipresent, like God. So music in this movie, unlike many other movies', is rather of structure than only of embellishment.
3. Introduction of director
The scenarist-director of this film, Wang Baomin, born in 1968, is a Ph.D. of Chinese Film History in Communication of China (former Beijing Broadcasting Institute). At present, he works as an instructor in this university, teaching film-making courses. He is a screenwriter, novelist, poet, and a film reviewer in China. His main works are as follow:
Screenplays:
1. Ah Mei’s DV diary (A Mei de DV Liu Yan ben, 阿美的DV留言本): a road & rock movie about two lovers driving a second hand car through Xinjiang, Yunnan and Hainan Island to seaching for past love, but failed. The film plans to cast Ding Wu as lead, who is main singer and guitarist of "Tang Dynasty", the most famous metal bands in China, their debut album "A Dream Return To Tang Dynasty" selling about 1 million. This is the second movie dream of the director, but till now it remains on the shelf.
2. The Forest Song (Feng Ru Song, 风入松): a fantastic chamber play completely presented in a secluded underground bookstore, comprised of only 18 shots. The title Feng Ru Song means the wind howled in the forest of pine trees, also as a pattern of ci—a Chinese classical poetry. This screenplay is collaborated with Wang YunQian, a young novelist and M.D. of comparative literature graduated from Fudan University, Shanghai.
Novels:
1. The Secret person (Mi Mi de Ren): a fantasy of an elementary school teacher attacked by paralysis and her long lonely life.
2. Zhao Yaojing’s fairy tales (Zhao Yaojing de Tong Hua): 10 pieces of fairy tales about instant-noodles, potatos, paper planes, pillow and so on. These tales created by an imaginary girl named Zhao Yaojing, who often appeared in her some melancholy works with a bit of Italo Calvino’s style.
3. Cui’er (Cui’er): a shepherdess in a grand grassland took herself to searching her brother of inexistence everywhere, finally she found him in a deep well. But it’s not reality, just an illusion.
DV:
1. Run away to Beijing (Zhao Xiao Jie, 50 minutes): a DV feature film about a girl whose name is Zhao tried to get out of her boy friend’s control but finally caught by him in suburb of Beijing.
2. My Mum is Coming (Wo Ma Lai le, 30 minutes): a DV documentary about director’s old Mum coming from remote countryside to visit her unruly son in the dilemma of his marriage, but finally, Mum left Beijing disappointedly.
Besides such works above, Wang Baomin wrote a lot of poems, this lends a strong poetic ambience to his first feature filmThe sunflowers, which he wrote and prepared it for two years and finally accomplished it as an independent production, by all personal investment. Like many fans of movies in China today, he contacted lots of art movies mostly through pirated DVD, and made his personal gusto to simplicity, austerity and sincerity of film-making.
In this film, all actors are non-professional, who are student, teacher, football coach, worker of repair-store in the village, manager of cinema in town, wandering singer and so on. They have affecting faces and expressions to reflect China today’s reality, the living of depressing and despairing. But happiness is there too: to sit in the sun and sell seeds.
4. Reviews
Sowing the Seeds of Regret:
Director Wang Baomin's debut effort mixes music with melancholy
The Sunflower (Kuihua duoduo) is set in a small Inner Mongolian town in Wuyuan County, home of vast fields of sunflowers and Qiaqia sunflower-seeds. Xiao Gang is a sunflower-seed roaster who has just been released from prison after serving a six-year sentence for rape. Haunted by his past, he spends his solitary days working near the sunflower field where he violated his victim, a pretty schoolteacher named Ah Mei with whom he had an affair. Filled with remorse, he tries to reach out to her through anonymous letters (consisting of a series of envelopes with a single sunflower petal in them), until she appears one day searching for the sender - only now she has changed from an innocent victim into a morally loose woman.
"I just wanted to make a story set in a quiet street in a small town, with only a few characters," says first-time director Wang Baomin, who collaborated on the film his with colleagues (actor Wang Mingjie and producers Fu Xiaohong and Tan Hua) from the China Communications University. Music plays a dominant role throughout: Singer-songwriter Yang Yi, who has been hailed as 'China's Answer to Bob Dylan' and used to play out in front of the National Art Museum, recorded songs for the soundtrack, which is intended to serve as both a motif and a bridge to the audience - a style that some critics have penned Minyao dianying (ballad film).
Cinematographer Qi Rui's vivid sense of color and knack for unexpected camera angles also make the The Sunflowers beautiful to watch, but the film has not been without its critics: At a test audience screening last month, audience members commented on how they felt that the movie's theme was too vague (Is it about guilt? Redemption? A morality play?), while others found the cranked-up soundtrack too distracting - each section opens and closes with portions of the same song. Wang Baomin, nevertheless, remains unrattled by the criticism: "This is, after all, a debut film for us ... we wanted to make a movie and then we discovered Yang Yi. So we just made it. Songs are indeed a dominant part of the movie ... but after all, it is a ballad film. (Alice Wang, http://www.thatsbj.com)
The Ballad of the Sunflowers
from Archive of 62. mostra internazionale d'arte cinematografica
by Silvana Silvestry
China is much closer than it once was, but it is no longer an idealised country – we can now fully evaluate its precise effect by taking a look at the stock exchange listings. Wang Baomin’s refined debut, Kuihua Duoduo, is a “cultured” work made by a professor of cinema at the University of Beijing, a man born in 1968 and who was 21 during the Tiananmen uprising. He made his film entirely independently, produced it himself and shot it in a village surrounded by endless fields of cultivated sunflowers. A ballad-singer arrived in the village, sets himself up on the sidewalk of the main village street and starts to sing accompanied by a guitar and harmonica. An authentic “Chinese Bob Dylan”, as is defined Yang Yi, the actor who plays the lead. The song tells the story of an unhappy love affair. Along the same street comes a man who has just been released from prison, where he has been serving a six-year sentence for the rape of a young schoolteacher. Laconic and negatively effected by his solitude, he managed to get the local police commissioner’s permission to go back to his old job of sunflower-seed toaster and is given a place to sleep. The film’s fascination lies in the way it follows the tiny steps taken by the man in his attemp to rediscover the places of his younth and the young woman of his past, to whom he sends a single sunflower petal each day. It was precisely in a field of sunflowers that hi raped her one day. But is this what really happened?, we wonder. In fact, we now know that China is about to abolish a law outlawing premartial sex, something that only recent economic upheavals have brought into question. Those who were “guilty” of this crime, for example, were not allowed to enrol at university; if a student wanted to get married yet engaged in premarital sex he had to forfeit his right to marriage, and if a woman fell pregnant then she had to have an abortion if she wanted to continue studying. Considering all of this, the film poetically evokes the absurdity of a real situation, imprisonment for a gesture of love, and, moving from a personal to a more general dimension, the historical overturning of the encircling of the city by the country. Infact, what we are offered is a location that belongs to times past now that industrialisation and the city have become the driving forces behind the Chinese economy, the country’s transforming might.
The deserted streets of the village bring to mind the policy of transferring peasants, farm workers and country folk to industrial areas, thanks to which arable land is being devoured by urbanisation. The sunflowers fields, as an economy of the past, are a poetic element not only because of their overwhelming colour, but also because the sunflowers’ thick stalks evoke the bars of a prison, the pain associated with a past event, a place of refuge after the father’s suicide when the protagonist was still a child (and even the fleeting image of ther suicide and the anguished child’s consequent hiding among the stalks becomes a suspension of the narrative itself, bracketing off the story’s motives and reference points). The sumptuousness of the images becomes more and more oppressive, with their endlessly blinding sunlight and dusty roads.
The young teacher now looks like a city girl as she walks uninhibitedly in stiletto heels (so despised by Mao, who wrote entire invectives against those ‘Western sticks”) and gets into her colleagues’ cars; he finally rejects her after having desired her for so long. The contrast takes on the symbolic value of the old conflict between city and country, between new capitalism (or”Socialist market economy”, as it was defined in 1992) and the older organisation of farming communes. The sunflower, which in the language of flowers also implies “false riches”, is therefore not only a decorative element, but also signifies the end of the communes, the emptying of the countryside as people move to the cities with permits obtained at very great cost from local functionaries (transforming peasants into cut-rate labour), privatisation and the economic gulf between the city and the country.
The first Chinese films made just after the dismantling of the older system in the early 1980s had a recurring theme: youngsters (rather against their will) moved from the city to the communes in a sort of “descent towards the people”, towards the discovery of an unexpected reality – they would close their books and start working. After a period of gradual privatisation and an alliance between local authorities and speculators, there is the recent news of a peasant revolt whose aim is to confiscate land in different parts of the country: Kuihua Duoduo is an oasis of past times, a ballad about love but clearly alluding to these transformations. As Chinese cinema has long been influenced by Italian Neorealism, the title might also be a citation of De Sica (and especially the contrast between the disasters of war and nature defiantly continuing to bear up her fruits), but here the film might well be exhibiting a sort of contemporary visual language, a modern elaboration of the video clip: when, finally, the main character disappears along with those few characters surrounding him (the children who buy his roasted seed, the village idiot, the hairdresser, the old post-office manager and his beloved). Were they perhaps just mirages evoked by the songs, just as each film evokes stories and characters bofore the lights come on again?
And, finally, the movie-lover Wang Baomin is the first to pay homage to a rather important feature of old cinema: the bag of sunflower seeds we’d buy and eat as we sat there watching the movie.
The Sunflowers
By Derek Elley
An intriguing first feature by Chinese writer-director Wang Baomin, modern folk tale "The Sunflowers" won't bloom far beyond the festival circuit but has a stylish, balladic style that feels fresh in the usually navel-gazing arena of Mainland indie production. Relying considerably on the music of real-life street singer Yang Yi, helmer Wang finds a visual style -- like a contempo version of a Spaghetti Western -- that matches Yang's songs.
Divided into five chapters, pic opens with Yang strolling into a dusty town in western China and singing a song on his guitar about a man coming down from a mountain. Sure enough, along comes young Ma Xiaogang (Wang Minjie), after six years in stir, who gets a job selling roasted sunflower seeds on the street. Befriended by a girl (Wu Yingying) who nurses him during a fever, Ma finds himself besieged by memories of an earlier love, schoolteacher Mei (Sun Qian); of a ruffian youth spent in the sunflower fields outside town; and of the crime that got him jailed. Though overlong at 98 minutes, laconic pic has an engaging simplicity, and lensing by Qi Rui is impeccable.
( from www.variety.com)
THE SUNFLOWERS
1. A Synopsis of the film
This film is narrated by a singer, YANG YI, a famous wandering folk singer in real life in China today. He once sat and sang at streets of Beijing all day long, and taken into custody by police several times. But after freedom, he sat there again. His songs mostly express the feelings of the have-nots, the helpless. He wrote and performed 4 folk songs and all melodies for this film, just with a guitar and a harmonica. With unpretending narrative style and a 5-chapters structure: Laboring, Appearing, Xiao Qian, A Mei and Reoccurring, the film tells a story about an accidental rape affair:
Several years ago, Ma Xiaogang, an orphan in a town of West in China, raped a girl, A Mei, a teacher of an elementary school, at a great sunflowers field. He was put in jail. When he was free and came back to the town, he became a taciturn man. No one knew his secret. With help of a good old policeman, He ran a little shop at Shadow Mountain Street to make and sell roasted sunflower-seeds, willing to wash off the guilty by working hard. Sometime, when he was not busy, he dated with Zhang Xiaoqian, a naive girl who loved him: going to cinema, having a walk, sitting outside the door to listen the casual guitar of the wandering singer. Time went slowly and leisurely.
But every time when he passed by that field, the blooming sunflowers reminded him of the past, the days full of desire and love to that girl, A Mei. He began to imagine and imagine her life of today. Where she was? How was her life? With strong curiosity, he sent some letters to her old address, never expecting them can get to her.
One day, a strange woman called in on his shop. She was A Mei. So they met again. But how they get along with each other? In his eyes, she has changed a lot, not being a pure girl like before. Finally he decided to love her, with deep regrets. But she did not understand at all. It made him a little desperate, also let him blame himself much more.
One day, they came to the great sunflower field again. In sight of the setting sun, they burst to love and rushed into sunflowers…After that, they sat there for a long time, quietly and numbly. Finally, A Mei was gone, only with a brokenhearted word left: "the whole damn world has changed after all. " Night was falling, and Ma Xiaogang was back home too, at loose ends. He sat in his room all night. The next day and the next night, he was in the sunflower field again, with a sickle in the hand. He stood there so long and so long, suddenly, began to chop the sunflowers crazily……
Morning was coming at the Shadow Mountain Street, the na?ve girl was coming too, but the poor boy was never been there again. In sight of all of the scenes, our lonely singer carried his guitar and pack, leaving this town forever.
2. Director's notes
The sunflowers is my first feature film. This is an idyllic folk movie. The story is narrated by a folk singer, YANG YI, a famous wandering singer in China. He wrote and performed 4 folk songs and all music for this film with a guitar and a harmonica. The simple style of his singing gives the movie some deep feelings and impressions. So we call it a 'folk movie', a rural sight and sound, as beautiful and natural as a sunflower blooming in soil.
With unpretending narrative, the film tells a story about a boy set free after six years prison: his desire, his love, and his despair. The simplicity of setting and acting, the poetry of 5-chapters structure, the easygoing rhythm of story-telling, the silence of the whole movie, make an idyllic aesthetics of the work. This film needs absorbed attitude to view, you must devote some emotion to it, and you'll get more.The film was shot in west of China, at foot of Shadow Mountains, where there are lots of sunflowers blooming all over. They gave the film a western style and symbolistic mode. In this film, all actors are non-professional, who are student, teacher, football coach, worker of repair-store in the village, manager of cinema in town, wandering singer and so on. They have affecting faces and expressions to reflect China today's reality, the living of depressing and despairing. But happiness is there too: to sit in the sun and sell seeds.
Narrative:
Though the story is an innermost, secret affair, it slowly tells with a skill of a suspense movie, like Hitchcock's. Firstly, a boy came, wrote and sent several letters, we can't find what he wanted to do. Then a girl in the town came and loved him, they went to cinema, he was upset a little. Then a strange woman came, we knew a little, but not very sure. Finally they went to the sunflowers field, and disappeared into it. At that time, all the things were there: the past, the secret, the desire and the hurt. In my mind, more important than this secret in the film, it is the hero's daily life, his labor, his leisure, his face in the sun and shadows. So we must fix our eyes-or camera's eyes-on this sunny street, on this poor boy's face, on that na?ve girl's hands-there is a little sunflower which would be put in the door of the absent country boy.
Image:
In the present tense, the image will be in cold tone, implying the hero's peaceful mind, and his loneliness; at the same time, it will be a little of overexposure, just like the sunny street and the sunny sunflowers' look: shadows and sunlight, implying the boy's upset. In the past tense, the image will be in warm tone, brilliant and exciting, implying the hero’s young and ardent love. All this disposals especially exhibited in the sunflowers of the two tenses. Besides, the camera's movements have two styles: in the past, unstable; in the present, stable
Act:
All the actors will be non-professional. We need them naturally coming and going, speaking and smiling. They have little lines to learn, I didn’t prepare more in the script. More often, they must say them out in their own way, just like in real life; if they can't say naturally their lines themselves, all they can do is: shut up. So we get a nearly silent movie. I like it. And this film hasn't sex, violence, comedy, tragedy. It has nothing, except sitting there, bicycling there, running and pausing there, finally, being put into trance there.
Sounds & Music:
The most of sounds in this movie are silence, except sounds of wind in sunflowers field, of motorcycles in the afternoon, of footsteps out of the door, of un-discerned things in the street at night. Some of them came from the hero's mind, with super-realistic style.
The music and the songs have the same origin: the wandering singer sitting all day long across the street. Sometimes he wasn’t there, but he didn't go too far away; in the whole story, he was omnipresent, like God. So music in this movie, unlike many other movies', is rather of structure than only of embellishment.
3. Introduction of director
The scenarist-director of this film, Wang Baomin, born in 1968, is a Ph.D. of Chinese Film History in Communication of China (former Beijing Broadcasting Institute). At present, he works as an instructor in this university, teaching film-making courses. He is a screenwriter, novelist, poet, and a film reviewer in China. His main works are as follow:
Screenplays:
1. Ah Mei’s DV diary (A Mei de DV Liu Yan ben, 阿美的DV留言本): a road & rock movie about two lovers driving a second hand car through Xinjiang, Yunnan and Hainan Island to seaching for past love, but failed. The film plans to cast Ding Wu as lead, who is main singer and guitarist of "Tang Dynasty", the most famous metal bands in China, their debut album "A Dream Return To Tang Dynasty" selling about 1 million. This is the second movie dream of the director, but till now it remains on the shelf.
2. The Forest Song (Feng Ru Song, 风入松): a fantastic chamber play completely presented in a secluded underground bookstore, comprised of only 18 shots. The title Feng Ru Song means the wind howled in the forest of pine trees, also as a pattern of ci—a Chinese classical poetry. This screenplay is collaborated with Wang YunQian, a young novelist and M.D. of comparative literature graduated from Fudan University, Shanghai.
Novels:
1. The Secret person (Mi Mi de Ren): a fantasy of an elementary school teacher attacked by paralysis and her long lonely life.
2. Zhao Yaojing’s fairy tales (Zhao Yaojing de Tong Hua): 10 pieces of fairy tales about instant-noodles, potatos, paper planes, pillow and so on. These tales created by an imaginary girl named Zhao Yaojing, who often appeared in her some melancholy works with a bit of Italo Calvino’s style.
3. Cui’er (Cui’er): a shepherdess in a grand grassland took herself to searching her brother of inexistence everywhere, finally she found him in a deep well. But it’s not reality, just an illusion.
DV:
1. Run away to Beijing (Zhao Xiao Jie, 50 minutes): a DV feature film about a girl whose name is Zhao tried to get out of her boy friend’s control but finally caught by him in suburb of Beijing.
2. My Mum is Coming (Wo Ma Lai le, 30 minutes): a DV documentary about director’s old Mum coming from remote countryside to visit her unruly son in the dilemma of his marriage, but finally, Mum left Beijing disappointedly.
Besides such works above, Wang Baomin wrote a lot of poems, this lends a strong poetic ambience to his first feature filmThe sunflowers, which he wrote and prepared it for two years and finally accomplished it as an independent production, by all personal investment. Like many fans of movies in China today, he contacted lots of art movies mostly through pirated DVD, and made his personal gusto to simplicity, austerity and sincerity of film-making.
In this film, all actors are non-professional, who are student, teacher, football coach, worker of repair-store in the village, manager of cinema in town, wandering singer and so on. They have affecting faces and expressions to reflect China today’s reality, the living of depressing and despairing. But happiness is there too: to sit in the sun and sell seeds.
4. Reviews
Sowing the Seeds of Regret:
Director Wang Baomin's debut effort mixes music with melancholy
The Sunflower (Kuihua duoduo) is set in a small Inner Mongolian town in Wuyuan County, home of vast fields of sunflowers and Qiaqia sunflower-seeds. Xiao Gang is a sunflower-seed roaster who has just been released from prison after serving a six-year sentence for rape. Haunted by his past, he spends his solitary days working near the sunflower field where he violated his victim, a pretty schoolteacher named Ah Mei with whom he had an affair. Filled with remorse, he tries to reach out to her through anonymous letters (consisting of a series of envelopes with a single sunflower petal in them), until she appears one day searching for the sender - only now she has changed from an innocent victim into a morally loose woman. "I just wanted to make a story set in a quiet street in a small town, with only a few characters," says first-time director Wang Baomin, who collaborated on the film his with colleagues (actor Wang Mingjie and producers Fu Xiaohong and Tan Hua) from the China Communications University. Music plays a dominant role throughout: Singer-songwriter Yang Yi, who has been hailed as 'China's Answer to Bob Dylan' and used to play out in front of the National Art Museum, recorded songs for the soundtrack, which is intended to serve as both a motif and a bridge to the audience - a style that some critics have penned Minyao dianying (ballad film).
Cinematographer Qi Rui's vivid sense of color and knack for unexpected camera angles also make the The Sunflowers beautiful to watch, but the film has not been without its critics: At a test audience screening last month, audience members commented on how they felt that the movie's theme was too vague (Is it about guilt? Redemption? A morality play?), while others found the cranked-up soundtrack too distracting - each section opens and closes with portions of the same song. Wang Baomin, nevertheless, remains unrattled by the criticism: "This is, after all, a debut film for us ... we wanted to make a movie and then we discovered Yang Yi. So we just made it. Songs are indeed a dominant part of the movie ... but after all, it is a ballad film. (Alice Wang, http://www.thatsbj.com)
The Ballad of the Sunflowers
from Archive of 62. mostra internazionale d'arte cinematografica
by Silvana Silvestry
China is much closer than it once was, but it is no longer an idealised country – we can now fully evaluate its precise effect by taking a look at the stock exchange listings. Wang Baomin’s refined debut, Kuihua Duoduo, is a “cultured” work made by a professor of cinema at the University of Beijing, a man born in 1968 and who was 21 during the Tiananmen uprising. He made his film entirely independently, produced it himself and shot it in a village surrounded by endless fields of cultivated sunflowers. A ballad-singer arrived in the village, sets himself up on the sidewalk of the main village street and starts to sing accompanied by a guitar and harmonica. An authentic “Chinese Bob Dylan”, as is defined Yang Yi, the actor who plays the lead. The song tells the story of an unhappy love affair. Along the same street comes a man who has just been released from prison, where he has been serving a six-year sentence for the rape of a young schoolteacher. Laconic and negatively effected by his solitude, he managed to get the local police commissioner’s permission to go back to his old job of sunflower-seed toaster and is given a place to sleep. The film’s fascination lies in the way it follows the tiny steps taken by the man in his attemp to rediscover the places of his younth and the young woman of his past, to whom he sends a single sunflower petal each day. It was precisely in a field of sunflowers that hi raped her one day. But is this what really happened?, we wonder. In fact, we now know that China is about to abolish a law outlawing premartial sex, something that only recent economic upheavals have brought into question. Those who were “guilty” of this crime, for example, were not allowed to enrol at university; if a student wanted to get married yet engaged in premarital sex he had to forfeit his right to marriage, and if a woman fell pregnant then she had to have an abortion if she wanted to continue studying. Considering all of this, the film poetically evokes the absurdity of a real situation, imprisonment for a gesture of love, and, moving from a personal to a more general dimension, the historical overturning of the encircling of the city by the country. Infact, what we are offered is a location that belongs to times past now that industrialisation and the city have become the driving forces behind the Chinese economy, the country’s transforming might.
The deserted streets of the village bring to mind the policy of transferring peasants, farm workers and country folk to industrial areas, thanks to which arable land is being devoured by urbanisation. The sunflowers fields, as an economy of the past, are a poetic element not only because of their overwhelming colour, but also because the sunflowers’ thick stalks evoke the bars of a prison, the pain associated with a past event, a place of refuge after the father’s suicide when the protagonist was still a child (and even the fleeting image of ther suicide and the anguished child’s consequent hiding among the stalks becomes a suspension of the narrative itself, bracketing off the story’s motives and reference points). The sumptuousness of the images becomes more and more oppressive, with their endlessly blinding sunlight and dusty roads.
The young teacher now looks like a city girl as she walks uninhibitedly in stiletto heels (so despised by Mao, who wrote entire invectives against those ‘Western sticks”) and gets into her colleagues’ cars; he finally rejects her after having desired her for so long. The contrast takes on the symbolic value of the old conflict between city and country, between new capitalism (or”Socialist market economy”, as it was defined in 1992) and the older organisation of farming communes. The sunflower, which in the language of flowers also implies “false riches”, is therefore not only a decorative element, but also signifies the end of the communes, the emptying of the countryside as people move to the cities with permits obtained at very great cost from local functionaries (transforming peasants into cut-rate labour), privatisation and the economic gulf between the city and the country.
The first Chinese films made just after the dismantling of the older system in the early 1980s had a recurring theme: youngsters (rather against their will) moved from the city to the communes in a sort of “descent towards the people”, towards the discovery of an unexpected reality – they would close their books and start working. After a period of gradual privatisation and an alliance between local authorities and speculators, there is the recent news of a peasant revolt whose aim is to confiscate land in different parts of the country: Kuihua Duoduo is an oasis of past times, a ballad about love but clearly alluding to these transformations. As Chinese cinema has long been influenced by Italian Neorealism, the title might also be a citation of De Sica (and especially the contrast between the disasters of war and nature defiantly continuing to bear up her fruits), but here the film might well be exhibiting a sort of contemporary visual language, a modern elaboration of the video clip: when, finally, the main character disappears along with those few characters surrounding him (the children who buy his roasted seed, the village idiot, the hairdresser, the old post-office manager and his beloved). Were they perhaps just mirages evoked by the songs, just as each film evokes stories and characters bofore the lights come on again?
And, finally, the movie-lover Wang Baomin is the first to pay homage to a rather important feature of old cinema: the bag of sunflower seeds we’d buy and eat as we sat there watching the movie.
The Sunflowers
By Derek Elley
An intriguing first feature by Chinese writer-director Wang Baomin, modern folk tale "The Sunflowers" won't bloom far beyond the festival circuit but has a stylish, balladic style that feels fresh in the usually navel-gazing arena of Mainland indie production. Relying considerably on the music of real-life street singer Yang Yi, helmer Wang finds a visual style -- like a contempo version of a Spaghetti Western -- that matches Yang's songs.
Divided into five chapters, pic opens with Yang strolling into a dusty town in western China and singing a song on his guitar about a man coming down from a mountain. Sure enough, along comes young Ma Xiaogang (Wang Minjie), after six years in stir, who gets a job selling roasted sunflower seeds on the street. Befriended by a girl (Wu Yingying) who nurses him during a fever, Ma finds himself besieged by memories of an earlier love, schoolteacher Mei (Sun Qian); of a ruffian youth spent in the sunflower fields outside town; and of the crime that got him jailed. Though overlong at 98 minutes, laconic pic has an engaging simplicity, and lensing by Qi Rui is impeccable.
( from www.variety.com)
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