If only I could call my mother again.

In a small village in Wushan County in the 199s, Li Dongmei, a 12-year-old girl, spent seven days from the last time she had dinner with her mother to her death. Mother died in childbirth, and what she left home was the fifth girl. My father who went out to work came back and cried in front of his dead wife's grave. As the eldest daughter, Dong Mei said to her father, "I will be filial to you in the future, just like my son."

Later, Li Dongmei became the only child in the village who was admitted to a university and went to a big city. At the age of 31, she gave up her stable job and chose to study abroad to read movies. At the age of 4, she made her childhood experience into a feature film debut, Mom and Seven Days.

poster of "Mom and Seven Days"

The just-concluded Gothenburg Film Festival is the only international A-class film festival in Northern Europe. As the only China film, "Mom and Seven Days" was shortlisted, and finally won the "ingmar bergman" international debut award, and she became the first China director to win the award.

Gothenburg wrote in his award speech: "Through frank expression and brave minimalism, the director conveyed a true feeling full of introspection and invited all of us to feel it emotionally, intellectually and even instinctively. The audience is immersed in an immersive, emotional and contemplative experience, which is as close as possible to what the film art expects. "

Li Dongmei's award speech at Gothenburg Film Festival

This film made a stunning appearance at Venice Film Festival before, and won the Fei Mu Prize for Best Picture at Pingyao International Film Festival last year. Li Dongmei, who faced the pain directly with the film, also accepted and released himself with this film.

"Half-family" mothers and girls who haven't grown up

"For me," Mom "is more than a movie, it is a part of memory precipitation." Li Dongmei defines this feature film as her first novel. This part is pain, which is difficult for her to cope with during a long period of growing up. But she always knew that in the face of this kind of pain, she should have a choice. "One is to turn your back on it, and the other is to face it. When I had enough courage to face it, I decided to start writing this script. This is the initial starting point, and it is also a commemoration and farewell. "

The stills of "Mom and Seven Days"

The film almost completely restored her last childhood memories of her mother, which began in the second week of Li Dongmei's middle school. Before leaving home, she had a meal with her mother, grandmother and sisters. In the movie, my mother is silent, wearing simple ear-length short hair, making charitable eyes, holding a big belly, often doing housework, and occasionally sitting in a daze.

Stills of "Mom and Seven Days"

Li Dongmei remembers that their family is almost the only one in the village without a son. When there is a friction between mother and people, the other party will scold her as "half-family". Half a family means that a family without a son is incomplete, which is a humiliating thing in that small mountain village.

In Li Dongmei's growing memory, it is common for her mother to get pregnant again and again and wait for her younger brother to be born. Every time the mother is pregnant, the expectation for the boy is always revealed in the old man's face. Because she has been pregnant, Dong Mei, as an elder sister, has to live with her sisters. When my mother was in labor for the fifth time, Sisei was only one year old and was still in foster care with her relatives. Dongmei took her second and third sisters through a long mountain road to go to school and play. They don't know the cruelty of life yet, and they look innocent.

Dad goes out to work, while the old people do idle work. Mom is pregnant, and life flows silently. Before the ending comes, it seems so quiet that she doesn't notice that this is a passing.

On the night of delivery, my mother's placenta fell into the uterus. It's a long way to the town hospital. Four neighboring men lifted their mother on the slide pole, and the journey on the mountain road seemed to be in the foreseeable future. Grandma ran after her mother with a flashlight, and the light of the flashlight was far behind in the dark, getting farther and farther ... < P > Actually, grandma's house was in the town, which was closer to the hospital. My aunt and uncle called and disagreed with her mother's giving birth at her grandmother's house on the grounds that it would be "bad for her family" for her married daughter to give birth at her parents' home. So, grandma accompanied her mother to grandma's house in the mountains, which is at least ten kilometers from here to the town hospital.

"When I came home five days later, my mother was gone. My sister and I came back from school, and the mother we just met five days ago has turned into a corpse, lying in the corner of the house. A few hours ago, the doctor announced her death. My sister and I knelt on the ground and began to cry. I can't believe this is a fact. "

Before the mother gave birth, an aunt in the neighbor's house also went through childbirth, and gave birth to a stillbirth. The family was sad, and the birth and funeral of the child were done together. That's another family's sad song.

The stills of "Mom and Seven Days"

From the seven days of the movie, it is the life of Li Dongmei and his sisters. The year her mother left, Li Dongmei was 12 years old. From then on, she said that there was a 12-year-old girl in her heart, who stayed in an abyss and could not grow up. "I think I have always had a sense of guilt when I was growing up. I always think that if I were a son, my mother wouldn't suffer so much from the back. I think my sisters also have it. We didn't communicate this matter, but this feeling of guilt and pain has always shrouded us. "

31-year-old film director and 2-year-old editor who was driven crazy

In the film, Xiao Xian' an, as the incarnation of Li Dongmei, comforted his father who was crying at his mother's grave and said, "I will be filial to you in the future, just like a son." In life, Li Dongmei doesn't remember whether she really had a chance to say this sentence to her father for a long time, but at the moment when she decided to make this film, it was a line that she must put in.

"Mom and Seven Days" stills

Movies are always used to interpret dreams. And someone used it to compensate for a nightmare.

Li Dongmei is very strong, and he has studied well since childhood. She was the first college student in that small village. She went to Chengdu to study English and American literature and became an English teacher after graduation. She likes teaching, but also benefits from her good English and sees a bigger world. But she's still upset.

"I think there is actually some pain in my heart. I have been stuck in that place and I don't know what to do, so I feel particularly uneasy for a long time. This anxiety is close to the feeling of despair, a way, an exit. "

By chance, her foreign language tutor found that she was very attentive when looking at some natural landscapes such as flowers and plants. That kind of concentration was calm, which was very different from her usual anxiety. So he suggested that Li Dongmei could try to learn photography.

Li Dongmei found her interest in images from the time she came into contact with photography, but she seems to prefer telling stories to photography. And in the story she wants to tell, there are things that are extremely important to her life.

So 31-year-old Li Dongmei did something that surprised people around him, quit his well-prepared job and went to Australia to watch movies. "I went to school to resign, and the principal asked me what I was going to do. I said I was going to study movies. Now think about that scene, it may be quite funny. " This is the late rebellion of the lovely girl Li Dongmei.

She was admitted to the Director Department of Melbourne University. As an undergraduate, she is an older student in her class. She is not only older, but also knows almost nothing about movies. Many local classmates have had good filming practice in high school. "At that time, I couldn't tell the specifications of various films, and I didn't understand many movie terms, let alone genres, but I never doubted my original decision." Li Dongmei is very grateful to the school's film education. "It protects me well. What I want to express and what I am interested in has never been denied."

Li Dongmei's films are special.

stills of "Mom and Seven Days"

"Mom and Seven Days" is not a "good-looking" movie, with fixed shots, panoramic views and long shots, and no tricks. Mountain roads, vegetation, a vegetable and a meal, or people walking or sitting quietly, even the language is very few, and there are no auxiliary plot means such as music. Minimalist and natural aesthetics adds an author's expression to the film.

In fact, this very personal and subtle emotion is the skill and charm of this seemingly simple film, which captures some truth about the flow of time and life with the lens.

It took 11 days to shoot the film, and it took a year later. In this editing work, which doesn't need any special effects and many scenes don't need to be cut, the editor is extremely painful. At an internal sharing meeting at Pingyao Film Festival, the editing guy in his twenties complained that the pace of director Li Dongmei was too slow. "After the film was arranged at the beginning, it was hardly adjusted, and there was no sound and painting skill. It took a year to edit, and almost all of it was in the choice of editing points. In almost every scene, the director asked me to multiply it by 1.5 to twice. It may be that my life experience is different and I feel different about the rhythm. The director wants to stare at it. And these contents, such as eating, sleeping and walking, have extended the time by multiple times, which may be the reason for the silence of the film.

Stills of "Mom and Seven Days"

Regarding such a choice, Li Dongmei said that it followed intuition and tried to restore the memory fragments that went deep into the bone marrow. The length of time not only explained the content, but also affected the viewer's feelings. "It was not that I chose such aesthetics, but that I had such an important experience in my life that made me complete such a movie." But she also knows that "editors in their twenties are going to be driven crazy by a 4-year-old director of mine."

When it first appeared in Venice, the film surprised western audiences. In the October 22 issue of the Film Handbook, the editor-in-chief Marcos Uzal published an article Vacance de Venice, saying that Mom met his greatest expectation for the Venice Film Festival-enlightenment. "At first glance," Mom and Seven Days ",which was shot with a distant and quiet fixed long lens, will be quickly classified as a well-known China rural chronicle film. But this feeling of deja vu will soon be forgotten, because the expression of this film is out of the pursuit of purity and minimalism, and it is by no means flattering and artificial ... Its narrative technique will remind us of Hou Xiaoxian's early chronicle works, in which the story unfolds in a certain period of time, death is caught as a gap in the timeline, and the core is the indifference of the surrounding environment. "

The 15,-policy mortgage loan and the bonus used to pay back the flowers

The birth of this film is not only difficult to tap the spiritual level of one's own pain experience, but also difficult to make a movie.

Wu Jueren, the filmmaker of Pingyao, said when introducing the film to the media, "It started with an insurance policy." After Li Dongmei decided to shoot "Mom", it became "urgent". Although some friends suggested that she go to some venture capital to find money slowly, it must be done immediately for her. "Writing a script has accumulated a lot of strength and emotion. If I don't do it right away, I am afraid that this matter will not be done in the future." Li Dongmei started from college, and made nine short films in one go. The preparation time of short films often takes half a year, while the preparation period of "Mom" is only three months. "I told my friends that it's like talking about an online love. If you don't show up, you may lose your strength for a while and it will be yellow."

So she mortgaged a policy for Simei and got 155, yuan of insurance. Since the beginning of writing "Mom", Li Dongmei has devoted all his energy to pure creation. Earlier, she did some business and took over some jobs, and she had savings to maintain her creation for a period of time. "Life was quite comfortable, and I was quite confident." Li Dongmei knows what he wants, earns money to study, knows that he can create with more peace of mind if he has savings, and also knows that he can choose concentration and purity without being involved in material anxiety.

Pingyao got the bonus, and Li Dongmei said, "Great, you can pay back the flowers if you have money." Asked about her financial situation, she was also very frank. "Spend money, borrow money, and micro-loan in turn. Every month depends on the minimum repayment amount this month." "Mom" is the movie she wants to shoot most. Facing this, it is not just a movie, but a part of her life. She must be loyal to her feelings and have no choice of "market prospect". It may be the simplest way to keep pure without financing.

Li Dongmei at Pingyao Film Festival

Mom and Seven Days was a special presence at Pingyao Film Festival last year. In addition to being the winner of the "Fei Mu Honor" grand prize, it first encountered a refund, and the screening times were replaced by some kind of secret code "Hidden Dragon B", and in the process of screening, it set a legend of "the largest number of people leaving the scene". However, those who stay behind will be firmly nailed to their seats by the silent and heroic ending of the film, soaked with a deep and compassionate atmosphere that comes back from the fight, and recall what kind of preciousness and cruelty those previous "sleepy" daily lives contained.

Cheng Qingsong, the filmmaker, cried with Li Dongmei in her arms after the premiere. "For a woman of that age, such a move made me feel a little embarrassed, but I was very moved." Li Dongmei said. There are audiences who haven't bought tickets, waiting outside the movie palace, still wanting to see the director. "I have spoken to many audiences. I don't think I have spoken to so many people in my life. Each of them is so sincere. Many people tell me that they saw themselves in this movie with their painful experiences in their lives."

When talking about the feedback of the film harvest, Li Dongmei said, if you can, please help me to thank them again in the article. They like the film. I think everyone is a "Fei Mu honor". Some fans took notebooks or ticket stubs to Li Dongmei for autograph, some people would like her to write another sentence, and Li Dongmei would tell them, "Be brave."

"This is my biggest gain from making this film. If you think it's important for you to decide something, then do it. The whole filming process gives me a great sense of strength. I feel that I used to be drifting, helpless, and out of control of life. But after filming this time, I began to feel that I also had the strength to do something that might seem difficult to do in the eyes of others. " Li Dongmei said.

It was late at night in Pingyao on the day of interviewing Li Dongmei. We hid in the "small cave" in the interview room of the film palace. We talked in the dark without finding the switch, and we could see the light in her eyes. As she said, there was a 12-year-old girl who didn't grow up in her body, so she was sincere, keen and naive. There are some dialogues below, about movies, about Li Dongmei, or about some unspeakable pain.

Li Dongmei talks on the set of Mom and Seven Days

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