Qiu’s ‘Fuxi’ Competes at Tokyo Film Festival — SkimNews
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- Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting is competing at the Tokyo International Film Festival, linking four eras through four short stories and shared meals whose appeal to food and its meaning is expressed in each chapter’s own fantastical vocabulary.
- Qiu Jiongjiong began shaping the film during the pandemic as people felt an urgent desire to return to everyday life and gather around a table; he also said his first experience working with professional actors broadened his creative ambitions.
- A New Old Play, Qiu’s previous feature, focused on an individual’s personal history, whereas Fuxi uses its central meals to approach life and death and the relative scale between a meal, the sun and the moon.
- Lee Kang-sheng plays two elderly women from different eras, including a dying grandmother in the prehistoric chapter. Working with several dialect coaches, he said the Leshan-dialect film may be the one with the most dialogue he has ever had, yet he could not understand a word of it.
- Lee Hong-chi portrays Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo and said he learned of the role only when he received the script; he said the dialect was a challenge but that the nonrealistic aesthetic and Qiu’s world made him want to join the film.
- Qiu Jiongjiong: Fuxi: A Feast for the Universe runs at Chengdu’s A4 Art Museum through Jan. 31, using painting, video and installation around three Sichuan-style banquets to explore the region’s culture and ideas about life and death.
Why it matters: Lee Kang-sheng and Lee Hong-chi anchor Qiu Jiongjiong’s expansion from an individual personal history to four-era storytelling, with both actors taking on dialect-heavy roles. Qiu says his first work with professional actors broadened his ambitions, while a three-banquet Chengdu exhibition carries the project through Jan. 31.
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