Fuxi Competes at Tokyo International Film Festival — SkimNews
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- Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting is competing at the Tokyo International Film Festival as a sequence of four short stories set across four eras and linked by food and shared meals, with each chapter approaching the pleasure and meaning of eating through a fantastical vocabulary.
- Qiu Jiongjiong began shaping the film during the pandemic, starting from the urgent desire he heard people feel to return to everyday life and gather around a table.
- Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting, unlike Qiu’s “A New Old Play” centered on one person’s personal history, unfolds across eras and uses each chapter’s central meal to approach life and death and the relationship between the large and small.
- Lee Kang-sheng, who says the film has the most dialogue he has ever had but that he “couldn’t understand a word” of it, plays two elderly women from different eras, including a dying grandmother in the prehistoric chapter; the entire film is spoken in the Leshan dialect of Sichuan.
- Lee Hong-chi plays Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo and worked with dialect coaches, saying he joined because of Qiu’s nonrealistic aesthetic and the world Qiu had created.
- Qiu Jiongjiong says “Fuxi” was his first film made with professional actors, and that the experience broadened his creative ambitions.
- 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 solo show uses painting, video and installation to explore the region’s culture and ideas about life and death.
Why it matters: For Qiu Jiongjiong, “Fuxi” shifts the scale of his work from “A New Old Play’s” individual history to four eras joined by meals, with Qiu using those meals to frame life and death. The related Chengdu exhibition extends that inquiry through Jan. 31 using three Sichuan-style banquets, painting, video and installation.
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