This article is from WeChat official account:one (ID: yitiaotv), narrative: Kasianjia, editor: Xie Yimin, original title: “A 14-year-old orphan’s father-finding journey: I just want to call him Dad”, the first picture comes from: one piece
“Children of Light” poster
Director Ka Xianjia is a Tibetan director born in 1990 and a lover of Wanma Caidan. He is also the second Chinese to win the International Adister Gold Award after Jia Zhangke.
When he was only 24 years old, his debut work “Heroes Valley” was selected for the Contemporary Asian Film Festival at the MoMA Museum of Art. “Children of Light” is his first feature film. The starting point for his shooting is the rapid increase in divorce rates in Tibetan society in recent years. While the Internet has facilitated people, it has also had an impact on traditional marriages. ” The child’s parents are still there, but they are orphans.”
Mei Duo went to the pastoral area to meet his father
The film completed its world premiere in his hometown. We interviewed him in Xining. He said that he hopes his film will bring warmth and hope to people. “Although life is difficult, we still have to face it bravely. , Stay strong.”
“Why do people suddenly think of someone?”
“Children of Light” tells about a 14-year-old girl, Mei Duo, whose parents divorced when she was less than 1 year old because of her father’s cheating. The mother soon remarried and gave birth to two children. Mei Duo lived with her grandpa and grandma since she was a child, calling her grandpa “dad”. She had never seen her father until she was 14 years old. She suddenly wanted to find her father. We followed her to witness the process.
Mei Duo attends an orphan welfare school on weekdays. There are nearly 300 children in the school. I interviewed about 150 children to investigate the stories that might happen to them. Many children have both parents dead, or single-parent families. There are also people like Mei Duo. The father has never met and the mother is by his side, but the relationship is not very good. Now they live with their grandparents.
Mei Duo is very small, and she is not particularly outstanding in her class. I noticed her because she gave me a very sharp feeling when communicating. There is a lot of poetry in her language, “The sound of rain is the singing of water droplets”, “It will snow in September, and the summer here is very short.” I asked her what she liked, and she said that whenever she is in a bad mood, painting can give her happiness. She had never seen her father. She found a boy in the textbook. She thought that his father was like this, so she painted him.
One day when I was sleeping and lying on the bed, Mei Duo knocked on the door and suddenly came in and said, “PeopleWhy do you suddenly think of someone? “I immediately turned on the phone and asked what she just said? She told me slowly: “A child has not held hands with her father. She has never seen her father’s face or talked to him. , Why miss him suddenly? “
Mei Duo’s paintings
We are preparing to shoot this film at the end of 2016, and we will start shooting in the spring of 2017. Mei Duo and I need to maintain a very close relationship, so I became an English teacher, maybe two or three classes a week, and I contact them almost every day. During the year and a half of filming, I was either at school or at Meiduo’s house for about 25 days a month.
When I first started shooting, I didn’t say anything. I went to their house and got along with Mei Duo’s grandparents slowly. After shooting to a certain extent, I will talk about what this film is about.
Grandpa and grandma are already very old, and whether they treat cameras or record their lives, they are very free and casual. Their reaction was nothing more than “What can we photograph with my old husband and wife?” “What can we photograph with Mei Duo? Her studies are so bad.”
The home of Xiao Mei Duo and her grandfather and grandmother
Mei Duo’s mother is a little bit reluctant to face the camera. One reason is that she has a lot of pimples on her face. She wears a mask every time we shoot, and she also avoids talking about the reasons for her divorce from Mei Duo’s father.
Grandpa and grandma are particularly opposed to Mei Duo going to see her father. They think Mei Duo’s father is the one who abandoned her and is not worthy to be a father, but Xiao Mei Duo is very persistent. This may have something to do with her age.
Mei Duo was 14 years old when she went to see her father. It was a process of transition from a child to a young man. At this age, she has a lot of imagination about her father, origin and context, and she is more eager to see what these things are. Mei Duo went to visit his father who didn’t care about him, and carefully selected gifts, even ashamed of the meager gifts.
On the way to see my father
Mei Duo’s father came to the town to pick her up
Before we followed Xiao Mei Duo to find his father, we had some negative opinions about her father. After seeing me, I found that he was a particularly cheerful and handsome person. When he went to his home in the pastoral area, he was also very kind to people, which broke his original impression of him to a certain extent. After returning home, Mei Duo still remembered his father, “It feels like seeing a god.”
After returning, she also had a big quarrel with her grandparents. She saw that her father had a happy family, cattle and sheep, and grasslands. She even rode horses, sang songs, and chatted in the tent with her half-brothers and sisters. She was out of place and reluctant to leave. We later saw that she drew a picture. The whole family was on the grassland. There were Tibetan mastiffs, tents, and prayer flags beside her. She had these things in her heart, but she could not have them.
Mei Duo is with her half-siblings
Mei Duo’s father said on the prairie, “Divorce is no big deal for adults, but I really feel guilty for the children.” I actually doubt whether he is really guilty. Mei Duo’s illusion about her father slowly disillusioned. She said, “Dad always lied to me and said he would come to see me, but he never came. I heard that he came to the county and called him and said he was going back On the way.”
Later, Mei Duo’s grandfather also passed away. Such a series of changes are a great test for her vitality. She must be strong, must grow, and bravely face reality.
At the end of the film, when she went to ask the teacher for a piece of calligraphy paper, I encouraged her. This encouragement is actually just an auxiliary function. When she already has so much courage to face these tests in life, should we worry that she will not get a piece of paper?
Tradition is disintegrated, we are the orphans of modernity
At first, I didn’t want to film orphans, but wanted to capture the changes in Tibet over the years from the perspective of a Tibetan. I have lived in Tibet since I was a child, and returned after many years of leaving my hometown. There are many subtle changes in the local society that an outsider cannot see.
Qinghai Cordyceps is very rich in resources. Many people from the mainland went there, and after making a little money, they flew away and left their children on the grassland. Many children lost their fathers or mothers.
When we first started the investigation, we went to a village in a pastoral area. From 2016 to 2017, there were more than 20 divorced families in the village. Some of them broke up because of disagreements, but most of them were due to This is caused by WeChat.
While technology makes it easier to get to know each other, it also has a great impact on the traditional marriage model.
The scenes containing mobile phones appeared many times in the film: Mei Duo used her mobile phone to contact her relatives at school, and dialed the phone that her father never answered; her mother squatted in the corner and brushed Kuaishou and Douyin, unable to hear her daughter’s increasing loudness. Calling…
The village where Mei Duo lives
“Children of Light” describes the changes in Tibetan people’s concept of marriage and family structure over the years. These changes invisibly affect the growth of children and their inner world.
There is a scene in the film where the children of the welfare school sit together and talk about their families. You will find that these children are all at a very young age, maybe eight or nine months old, when their parents divorce, and then one of them Take away her siblings. They are no longer orphans whose parents have died in the traditional sense, but in Chinese, they are “living orphans”, “the parents are alive, but become orphans”.
The conflicts and contradictions in this kind of child’s heart may be more intense than other children. They know that their parents are still in this world, but they cannot live with them. In the TV version of this documentary, besides Mei Duo, there is a child. She is a little older than Mei Duo. She is a sophomore in high school and has a strong hatred for the father who abandoned her.
There is also a scene where the principal goes to visit the home of an orphan who wants to enter a welfare school. The little girl’s father abandoned the mother and daughter because of gambling, and the mother later died. The elders said that girls usually cry easily, and even if someone is around, they shrink aside and ignore them. Most divorces are impulsive, and various kinds of talk and gossip on the Internet can cause conflicts between husband and wife.
I have also been keen to spread and protect Tibetan culture and regard this as my mission. When I was studying Tibetan language and literature at Qinghai University for Nationalities, there was a wave of protecting national culture throughout the Tibetan area. I also set up a film team to tell Tibetan stories as a Tibetan.
In 2009, I went to a local village in the Amdo Tibetan area in northeastern Tibet to support education. I found that many young people and children no longer speak their mother tongue. The old people are worried about losing their language and culture. At the same time, A group of college students are working hard to reverse this situation. This is the origin of my first work “Heroes Valley”.
“Heroes Valley” poster
In 2014, “Heroes Valley” was invited by the American MoMA Museum of Art Contemporary Asia Theme Film Festival to be screened in American universities and film festivals.
Ang Lee’s movies have a great influence on me. I have watched his “Ten Years of Sleeping Movie Dream” many times. Whenever the filming encounters difficulties or particularly hard work, I will think of his experience. I also want to be like him. Compared with nationality, what I want to express is more universal-humanity and basic human emotions.
When I filmed “Children of Light”, I tried my best to shoot toward the sun. There is a layer of brilliance between the sun and the lens. Light represents a child’s desire for his father, and a life’s individual’s desire for love. desire.
In the past three years of contact with Mei Duo, Mei Duo has grown up, and I feel that I have also grown up with Mei Duo. I drift outside all the year round, working in a cross-cultural environment, and I also struggle with identity.
At this point, Mei Duo is more transparent than an adult. Once it was raining, we went to the hill, Mei Duo kept saying “hometown”, I asked you if this place you live now is not your hometown? Mei Duo said this is not the hometown, “Hometown is the place where you were born, and the place where you live is the place where you arrived after leaving your hometown.”
We had a preview in Tokyo. Many viewers in Japan were surprised. How could a 13-year-old child have such philosophical thinking(Philosophical Thinking)< /span>?
Mei Duo and sister on the hill
Now Mei Duo and I are like family, and her grandmother often calls me and asks when I will come? In the past two days, Mei Duo had no homework, and kept sending me WeChat, combined the stills of our shooting and made a video album and gave it to me. She also told me that she took the third place in the exam this time.
Add the card first to buy a gift for Mei Duo
Although this society is changing, I hope that children like Mei Duo in “Children of Light” will have the courage to face life and continue to go down bravely after seeing this film.
This article is from WeChat official account:one (ID: yitiaotv), Readme: Card Xianjia, Editor: Xie Yimin