I WISH I KNEW directed by Jia Zhang-ke, with Zhao Tao, Han Han, Chen Dan-qing and Rebecca Pan. A filmswelike release. 118 minutes. Subtitled. Opens today (Thursday, November 11). For venues and times, see Movies.
The last time I talked to Jia Zhang-ke, he was in Beijing editing I Wish I Knew. Nine months later, he’s brought his melancholy documentary to the Toronto Film Festival, so we get to sit down face to face.
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Speaking through a translator in a pleasantly cluttered nook in the offices of distributor filmswelike, Jia and I discuss his impressionistic approach to the documentary medium. His previous picture, 24 City, mixed interviews with actual residents of the factory town of Chengdu with recognizable actors playing the parts of residents. I Wish I Knew uses its subjects to paint a larger picture of a culture.
“Everyone is hurt by history in China, so Shanghai becomes a stage to act that out,” Jia says. “China’s past resonates with everyone in China, so the themes that they deal with are themes that everyone in China can relate to – themes of loss and hurt.
“Yet for every single person, Shanghai is a different place and has a different history. Making I Wish I Knew was my way of reimagining Shanghai for myself – looking at its history through the depiction of hurt, loss and disappearance.”
Jia made the movie as a commission for this year’s Shanghai World Expo. The announcement of the project turned a few heads, since his first four films had run into problems with government censorship. He assures me there were no such issues this time around: “I had complete freedom and artistic reign over the project. I did everything I wanted to do and told everything I wanted to tell.”
What he wanted to do was offer his fellow citizens a chance to publicly confront elements of their shared past – specifically the fall of Shanghai to the Communist People’s Liberation Army in 1949, and the Cultural Revolution that devastated the nation from 1966 to 1976. That doesn’t happen very often in China, at least not openly.
“In public and on the record, people are still very quiet about those events,” he says, “but individually, one-on-one, people always talk about them. That’s always been the case. My mission with a film like this is to turn the conversation from a private one to a public one. After 1949, there were people from Taiwan talking about this event and people in Hong Kong talking about this event and people in China talking about this event. I wanted to combine all these voices – this plurality – into a single work.”
And now that he’s given those voices a movie, Jia’s working on his next project. This one’s a little different.
“I’m preparing a wuxia film set in 1905 China,” he says. “I’m writing the script right now. It’s complete fiction – but it also depicts China at a time of change. There’s lots of thievery and action and fight sequences, but it’s based on the same themes of loss and disappearance.”
normw@nowtoronto.com
