Chinese painter and filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong brings his new film ‘Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting’ to the Tokyo International Film Festival competition, a sweeping work born from the isolation of the pandemic years and built around one universal ritual: sharing a meal.
Qiu began shaping the film during the pandemic, when the world was suddenly forced to pause. That stillness, he tells Variety, sparked an urgent desire to return to everyday life — to gather around a table again — and that idea became the film’s starting point.
Qiu Jiongjiong (Credits: Variety)
‘Fuxi’ Connects Four Eras Through Food
‘Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting’ unfolds in sequence across four eras, told as four short stories. Each chapter approaches the pleasure of eating — and its deeper meaning — through its own fantastical vocabulary. An opening title card presents “Fuxi” as a phrase evoking both the delight of food and the act of eating itself.
Through the meals at the center of each chapter, Qiu approaches questions of life and death. “Through the individual lives of the characters, I wanted to explore a kind of relativity specific to this film — the relationship between the large and the small, or between a meal and the sun and the moon,” he says.
Lee Kang-sheng Plays Two Elderly Women in Sichuan Dialect
Taiwanese star Lee Kang-sheng, the longtime lead of director Tsai Ming-liang’s films, takes on a bold challenge: playing 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.
“This may be the film with the most dialogue I’ve ever had, but I couldn’t understand a word of it,” Lee says, revealing he worked with several dialect coaches. Qiu cast him after being drawn to his mysterious quality, saying it felt “perfectly suited to a character from ancient times” — which gave him the idea of asking the actor to play a woman.
Lee Hong-chi plays Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo, also coached in the dialect. This marks Qiu’s first time working with professional actors, an experience he says has broadened his creative ambitions. His solo exhibition, ‘Qiu Jiongjiong: Fuxi: A Feast for the Universe,’ runs at Chengdu’s A4 Art Museum through Jan. 31.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
