Chinese director Jing Yi Taps Remembrance of Xinjiang for ‘Botanist’

The first Chinese director Jing Yi can determine the precise moment that brought him to the filmmaker. The 31-year-old was born and grew up in a small village in the dry lawns of the Chinese distant northeast region of Xinjiang, near the border with Khazakstan. Coming in one of the few multicultural communities in China, far from the hectic glorious modern metropolis in the country – in the region are the home of Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Uyghurs and numerous other ethnic groups – early YI meetings from the cinema were limited to Sanita, the main points The price of broadcasting on Chinese state TV.

However, as he approaches the end of high school, his friend borrowed a hard drive filled with downloaded movies, cache full of works of Chinese masters-Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-Wai and Johnnie in Hong Kong-Ali also, foreign names that were him Totally unrecognizable: Emir Kusturica, Abbas Kiarostami, Terrence Malick, Satyjit Ray and others.

“A complete shock that has changed the way I see the world,” Yi says about the confusing but exciting diving experience in the vault of his friend about cinema classics. “I had no idea that the movies could be like this.”

Yi soon left his village to university studies in Beijing. But, like many from the Chinese hinterland, which were transferred to megalopolis that changed quickly in the country, he raised his homeland and longed for the quieter rhythms of his village and the huge natural vistas of Xinjiang. Wanting to express those feelings, he started experimenting with cameras and making short movies. His obsession with China grew and eventually continued his graduate study at the Chinese prestigious Beijing Film Academy.

Left debut feature, BotanistThe premiere in the section of the generation of the Berlin Film Festival Kplus this week is just what she would hope for from the cinema wunderkind of his unique background. Enigmatic and arrested job, taken with the beautiful pictures of Xinjiang’s grass spaciousness, the movie defying easily summary. The story of Arsin, a lonely Kazakh boy who comforts in plants and traditional folk beliefs he learned from his uncle, who mysteriously disappeared. Arsin’s world is stretched by the arrival of Meiyu, a han Chinese girl whose painful presence brings comfort, socializing and a strange sense of wonder. Together they explore the landscape and share unspoken intimacy, imagining their valley as an endless ocean. But one day, Arsin learns that Meiyu will move out to attend boarding school in Shanghai; And just like that, he was left alone again to catch modern changes that gradually tear into the fragile world of his village.

During his stay at the Beijing Film Academy, Yi won the support of the Chinese Star of the Art House Gan, whose feature is Tarkovsky-Esque Long day of trip in the night was a critical feeling at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Impact Bi – together with Malick, Kiarostami and Ray – is obvious in subtle ways throughout Botanist. After seeing and admiring some Yi’s shorts, he would become a mentor of a young director, giving comments Botanists Script and rough cut.

Today, he would praise for Liin’s debut, summarizing him as “simple and deep.” Explains: “Arsin and Meiyu are not only characters, but the coordinates of expression, their faces wearing and memory and distance. Still, Liin’s true protagonist is slightly higher: layered distance of Xinjiang. His work subtly develops the time gap between tradition and modernity, spatial divisions between the inland and the coast and the spiritual space of dreams between reality and illusion. “