Chinese painter and filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong began shaping his new film during the pandemic.
With the world suddenly forced to pause, he tells Variety, people felt an urgent desire to return to everyday life and to gather around a table.
That idea became the starting point for “Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting,” which is competing at the Tokyo International Film Festival. The film connects four eras through food and shared meals, with each chapter approaching the pleasure of eating, and its meaning, through its own fantastical vocabulary. An opening title card presents “Fuxi” as a phrase that evokes both the delight of food and the act of eating.
“This may be the film with the most dialogue I’ve ever had, but I couldn’t understand a word of it,” says Taiwanese star Lee Kang-sheng, the longtime lead of director Tsai Ming-liang’s films. He plays two elderly women from different eras, including a dying grandmother in the film’s prehistoric chapter. The entire film is spoken in the Leshan dialect of Sichuan province.
Lee Kang-sheng worked with several dialect coaches, Qiu says. “I was drawn to the mysterious quality about him, which felt perfectly suited to a character from ancient times,” he says. “That gave me the idea of asking him to play a woman.”
Taiwanese actor Lee Hong-chi, who also worked with dialect coaches, plays Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo. He had long admired Qiu’s visual work. “I only found out I was playing Su Dongpo when I got the script,” he says. “The dialect was a challenge for me, too, but I really wanted to be part of the film because of its nonrealistic aesthetic and the world Qiu had created.”
Unlike Qiu’s previous feature, “A New Old Play,” which focused on an individual’s personal history, “Fuxi” unfolds in sequence across four eras through four short stories. Qiu says he used the meals at the center of each chapter to approach questions of life and death.
“Through the individual lives of the characters, I wanted to explore a kind of relativity specific to this film – the relationship between the large and the small, or between a meal and the sun and the moon,” he says.
“Fuxi” was Qiu’s first time working with professional actors, an experience he says has broadened his creative ambitions. His solo exhibition, “Qiu Jiongjiong: Fuxi: A Feast for the Universe,” runs at Chengdu’s A4 Art Museum through Jan. 31. Built around three Sichuan-style banquets, the show uses painting, video and installation to explore the region’s culture and its ideas about life and death. Qiu is still developing his next project and has yet to settle on its subject or medium.
Asked about a recent film that made an impression on him, Qiu singles out Christopher Nolan’s epic “The Odyssey,” saying he is fascinated by its reconstruction of history and its aesthetic. Lee Kang-sheng says he recently watched Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the first time after Tsai and his actor friend Chang Chen recommended it.
“I was surprised that such a brilliant film could have been made so long ago,” he says. “It also made me more curious about different kinds of films.”
Lee Kang-sheng, whose work in Tsai’s “Walker” series has drawn international attention, has just wrapped filming on Argentine director Iván Fund’s science-fiction film “Bodies of Summer.” Asked what he might like to try after taking on dialect-heavy dialogue and female roles, he says he usually lets roles find him.
“Whether I’m playing a gangster or an old woman, I want to bring my own version of Lee Kang-sheng to the role,” he says. He adds that whenever one of Jason Statham’s films comes on television, he still wants to stop and watch it to the end. An action or martial-arts film, he suggests, could give him a chance to step outside his familiar screen image.
