Chinese artist-filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong has returned with his second fiction feature, “Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting,” which received its world premiere in the main competition of the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival. The film also picked up international backing as Parallax Films boarded worldwide sales.
Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting (Credits: Variety)
Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting — What We Know
Rooted in the folklore of China’s Sichuan province, the film unfolds through four separate feasts spanning four millennia that “bring the living and the dead, gods and ghosts, to the same table.” The word “fuxi” in the title is a Sichuan expression meaning “the joy of the belly” — a fitting name for a film built around food as ritual and myth.
Parallax describes the project as a “handcrafted mythic fantasy” that fuses painting, theatre and cinema. True to Qiu’s style, the film uses hand-painted scenic flats, handmade props and theatrical staging rather than reproducing reality, building a cinematic universe entirely his own.
The cast is led by Lee Kang-sheng, Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s longtime leading actor, who plays two grandmothers in different chapters — marking his first female roles on screen. He is joined by actor-filmmaker Lee Hong-chi (whose directorial debut Love Is A Gun won Venice’s Lion of the Future award) and Annie Chen of Netflix’s Born For The Spotlight.
From Locarno to Tokyo: Qiu Jiongjiong’s Journey
The film follows Qiu’s debut narrative feature, “A New Old Play” (2021), which won the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. That film told the story of an actor playing different roles across successive epochs of Chinese history, using stage techniques — rippling bedsheets for ocean waves, plastic trees for nature — to turn one life into a three-hour pageant.
With “Fuxi,” Qiu returns to the soundstage for what critics are calling a sensory banquet: less intellectually nourishing than his debut, perhaps, but rich in culinary and cinematic pleasure.
The project is a co-production between Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, produced by David Tang, Ningyuan Ding and Zhao Jin, with support from the HAF, MPA APSA Academy Film Fund, Red Sea Fund, Doha Film Institute and Bucheon’s NAFF.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
