According To The variety Silver Lion winner Cai Shangjun is back at the Venice Film Festival with competition title “The Sun Rises on Us All,” a restrained drama about guilt, complicity and the elusive possibility of forgiveness.
The film stars Xin Zhilei (“Blossoms Shanghai”) as Meiyun, whose life is upended when she encounters Zhang Songwen (“The Pioneer”) as Baoshu, the former lover who once went to prison for a crime she committed. Feng Shaofeng (“Wolf Totem”) co-stars as Qifeng.
Cai, who won Venice’s best director prize in 2011 for “People Mountain People Sea,” describes a filmmaking journey interrupted by the pandemic. “In 2017 I made a film called ‘The Conformist,’” he tells Variety. “After that film, I was involved in preparing for a new film. After 2019 the pandemic hit, and the climate for making films in China was not ideal, so I was quite pessimistic at the time. From 2019 to 2022, during those three years China was in lockdown, there was a relatively closed climate for making films. It wasn’t clear at the time whether it would be possible to make a relatively arthouse film. But luckily, after COVID there was some space for independent thinking. That’s when me and my wife collaborated together. My wife [Han Nianjin] wrote the screenplay.”
He sees a big change from his earlier films. “‘People Mountain People Sea’ and ‘The Conformist,’ I perhaps focused more on the less prominent characters in society, those who are facing injustices, or those who are angry about something, and their fight against those injustices,” he says. “You could call it perhaps more of a sort of social criticism. In ‘The Conformist’ I’m describing an average person in that particular era who is following the mainstream, and I suppose the fall of human nature. After COVID, societal changes that occurred in China have been huge. China is very different now than it was before COVID. If we look at it from a sociological point of view, naturally my perspectives and my approach have also changed. Now what I’m looking at more is the spiritual life of the Chinese people, and more of the struggles that are occurring internally.”
On the new film’s focus, Cai says: “This film, we decided to focus on the theme of morality. So it’s a very Chinese story about morals in China. It talks about themes such as sacrifice, but also giving back and what you get in return for that sacrifice. But it’s also talking about benevolence or kindness to the other person. But that also includes an element of hatred in it as well. There are layers to this.”
Cai worked with South Korean cinematographer Kim Hyunseok and French editor Matthieu Laclau, along with Tsai Yann-Shan, to shape the film. “I didn’t want the cinematography to be overly stylistic. I wanted it to follow the emotional logic of the characters in the film,” he explains. “To focus on the emotional experience of the characters, for example, the breathing of the characters to be in tune with that. We also didn’t want it to be overly focused on esthetics. If the audience, when watching the film, forgets about the director and the cinematographer, then that’s probably what we’re trying to achieve.”
On editing, he says: “Collaborating with Matthieu on this film, I have to say that it’s probably the most pleasant experience of working with an editor that I’ve had so far. Every two days he would update samples of the edit and when I saw these, I felt the sequence he had chosen was very much in line with my thinking. We edited around 47 versions of the film. We are both very open minded and receptive to each other’s ideas.”
Looking ahead, Cai is already thinking of his next film. “It will probably focus on a male character in his 30s from a small town in China, a small town between the countryside and the city which is his hometown. It’s probably going to be set during the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year, during the two week holiday. It’s going to be a story about love — specifically the search for a wife — with perhaps a tinge of black humor.”
“The Sun Rises on Us All” is produced by Guangzhou Mint Pictures and co-produced by a slate of Chinese partners. International sales are handled by Mk2 Films.
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