As a key project incubated by the Shanghai Film Group's "New Talent and New Works Plan", "The Land of Life" has demonstrated the "Shanghai Production"'s adherence to artistic quality from the script creation to international awards. A high proportion of the film's creative team came from the Shanghai Film Academy, and the new generation of "academicians" are also using their creations rooted in the land to deeply cultivate the contemporary expression of realistic themes.
At the Berlin Film Festival, which just concluded, the film "The Living Place", produced by Shanghai Film Group, won the Silver Bear Award for Best Director in the main competition unit. This is the first time in six years that a Chinese-language film has won a major award in the main competition unit of the world's three major film festivals, following "So Long, My Son" in 2019.
"The Living Place" was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival
"The Land of Life" is set in the early 1990s in the rural areas of northern China. It depicts the four seasons of an ordinary farm family in Bawangtai Village, Shangqiu, Henan Province, from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy. The film uses documentary-like lens language to truly restore rural life scenes such as spring ploughing and autumn harvest, weddings and funerals, and tells the daily beauty of rural China and the warmth of human ethics. The film uses a lot of Henan dialect dialogues, and the local villagers play themselves. The simple performances of amateur actors and long-shot scheduling construct an emotional resonance that transcends time and space.
Director Huo Meng won the "Best Director Award" in the main competition unit of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival for "The Land of the Living"
Director Huo Meng receives the award
The Berlin Film Festival jury praised the film with affectionate words: "In the face of the tide of changing times, this film takes us into a community spanning generations to witness their lives and customs passed down from generation to generation. The film delicately and profoundly depicts the warmth and struggle, light and darkness, and the deep ties between people in rural life, which makes the audience immersed in it and unable to look away..."
As a key project incubated by the Shanghai Film Group's "New Talent and New Works Plan", "The Land of Life" has demonstrated the "Shanghai Production"'s adherence to artistic quality from the script creation to international awards. A high proportion of the film's creative team came from the Shanghai Film Academy, and the new generation of "academicians" are also using their creations rooted in the land to deeply cultivate the contemporary expression of realistic themes.
It is reported that when filming "The Land of Life", the crew lived in the homes of fellow villagers, the actors were local villagers, and even the props were old objects bought from the villagers' warehouses. This creative method may not be "industrialized" enough, but it makes the work carry the warmth of the earth.
Stills from "The Living Place"
"The Land of Life" does not have a grand narrative, but focuses on the daily life of an ordinary village in four seasons. The dust raised during spring plowing, the heart-wrenching crying at the funeral, and the figures of children chasing each other among the haystacks, these details make people feel as if they are in the Henan Plain in the 1990s. The dialect dialogues and slightly clumsy performances of amateur actors make the story closer to the real texture of life. The cross-cutting of funerals and weddings, the rhythm of old cows plowing the fields under long shots, these seemingly plain pictures hide the unique philosophy of life in Chinese villages.
Stills from "The Living Place"
In addition to the film's story and aesthetics, the film's creative method is also simple and ingenious. It can even be said that it is a pious ceremony to the land. The crew stayed in Lingcheng Town, Shangqiu, Henan for a whole year, and the filming was synchronized with the growth of wheat seedlings. The filming team traveled to more than 30 natural villages, collected more than a thousand dialect samples, and restored wooden farm tools that had disappeared for 20 years.
As early as the venture capital stage two years ago, Xue Xiaolu, a professor at the Department of Literature at the Beijing Film Academy, praised "The Land of the Living" as a judge of the Golden Rooster Venture Capital. She once said in the review session, "You selected so many non-professional actors one by one, which is really respectable." At that time, she also said as a teacher at the Beijing Film Academy, "I especially hope to have the opportunity to invite you to give a class. From the perspective of the screenwriter and the actor, how to present the text and how to communicate with the actors. This is a very good case for film school students to understand how to realize one idea after another."
After watching the film in Berlin, the young film critic Shuiguai exclaimed, "It is an inspiring and awe-inspiring expression of youth". In Shuiguai's opinion, "The Land of the Living" is "an ambitious work by a young director with a brand-new and rare perspective and a deep insight into China's rural history". "Huo Meng is a very new generation of director. Even with the same rural narrative, it is different from the fifth and sixth generation literary imagination. The director's own experience and the deep integration of the land bring a brand-new narrative. The weddings and funerals, the succession of life and death here are too frivolous to be grafted and compared with the life difficulties of the urban middle class. It is certainly not a so-called custom spectacle, but a very rare rural group portrait that grows from within."
