The first film of Chinese Bi Gan is a marvel of poetry and humor between realism and fantasy.
To that keeps interest in what happens on screens beyond hypermédiatisées big machines, the singular proposals came from everywhere, do not miss. Almost every week care of the matter, even so many that it is difficult to navigate. Among these proposals, the Far East has been a quarter century a particularly fruitful source. And yet …
Yet it is unusual occurs an event such as the discovery of Kaili Blues , the feature debut of director 26 years, Bi Gan. Bi Gan Chinese, but just an eccentric region, southern Guizhou and tropical, and is from the ethnic minority Miao: not exactly the typical profile of young director prepared to impose on the international festival scene and screens arthouse. This is what he is going to do with this film that continues to grab rightly, all the awards in festivals where he is invited, from Locarno who revealed last August.
At the beginning of Kaili Blues , there are some common features to the Chinese auteur film, attention to gestures and atmospheres, a documentary dimension, bet on the fictional powers of everyday characters, in two physicians working and bored in a clinic. But previously unpublished tones, a penchant for strangeness lurking in the mundane and pulls fantastic humor with real flower, the presence of violence and misery, in a world where it is still common to sell children. And above all these poems erupt, disrupt and deceive.
The shock Tarkovsky
Poet, it was one of Bi Gan activities since childhood. It was also pumping gas, and construction blaster. Meet this young man who looks younger again, it’s going to meet a trajectory which is also a poem. The son of a truck driver and a dressing table, raised by his grandmother in the city of Kaili where the film begins, Bi Gan grew up in an environment where the culture had no place.
teenager, he wants to do television because “I love animals and I was hoping to spend their reports” . Only the media department of the University of Taiyuan, 2,000 km away, accept this unpromising aspirant, who knows nothing about cinema and did not care. One day, by chance, he falls to the library of the university on an extract of Stalker Tarkovsky. He hates what he sees at the point of deciding to write an article in the student newspaper against the film, it then looks in sections ten minutes on YouTube. Reaching the end, “I realized that I had seen the most beautiful film of my life.”
A teacher is interested in him, he discovers an unexpected talent, will see her parents to convince them to let him follow his path. Way that goes therefore to the cinema, but with detours: Bi Gan studied architecture, and learns to blow up parts of mountains suddenly explosives
An extraordinary plan
from all this we perceive traces in Kaili Blues , and you can hear his poems until then no one would read. Today, after his film won the Golden Horse, the highest award the Chinese film (awarded to Taiwan), a large publisher wants to publish.
Out of his world by improbable ways, it is also what tells Kaili Blues. Soon one of the doctors gets on his bike and leaves the city and its daily, charged with a dual mission -retrouver his nephew abandoned by his father, bring memories to the former lover of his colleague, now at the point of death. Chronic is road movie, exploration of unexpected situations and treated with levity, often with humor. One thinks of the hypnotic journey of Goodbye South, Goodbye Hou. It is that space travel is primarily a movement in time, and navigation in different states of reality, fantasy, dream.
Until the arrival in a village by a river, which begins a proper map extraordinary, if not unique in the history of cinema. It is not only that these forty minutes are one of the longest shots ever made for a fiction film, it is especially astonishing that this traffic in the village, its houses, streets, an impromptu party, meeting several protagonists, digress, surprise, composes itself a world of astonishing richness. The fluidity and complexity of which is then implemented reflect a virtuosity, but especially a sensitivity that sign without doubt the revelation of a filmmaker of the first magnitude.
emotion and ambition
Bi Gan, who recruited family members to interpret all the characters, had managed to find a few yuan to get help from a professional technical team -l’argent family and Prof. at the University of Taiyuan is past. This crew did not resist the particularly complicated shooting conditions, often under harsh physical and climatic conditions, especially for this extraordinary sequence shot, and deserted the film before the end. “I’m done with my buddies,” says smiling young director who seems to find it’s best.
Road-movie, family and sentimental adventure which arise documentary and fantastic, Kaili Blues continues to surprise by telling it like it by the way it is told. -a Gentle sweetness that does not dodge the hardships of reality-it makes its way toward a single idea of the ambitious and moving film, until the beautiful and infinitely open final sequence, which again calls into any game what a story can be programmed.
To make a living after graduating, Bi Gan worked nights at a gas station. Often the road woke him shouting “ Jiayou!” , which in Chinese means “do me full” but also “ you can do it” , “you can win” . Looks like it is gone.
Kaili Blues
of Bi Gan, Chen Yong-zhong, Guo Yue.
Duration: 1:50. Released on 23 March.
Sessions
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