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. 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. He had long admired Qiu’s visual work.
Qiu says he used the meals at the center of each chapter to approach questions of life and death. 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.
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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
