Cinema
Far from War
遠離戰爭年代
Hu Mei · 1987
Synopsis
Gu, an old retired soldier, a veteran of the Yan'an army, lives with his son in a cramped Beijing apartment; according to Offscreen, the son teaches strategy, the daughter-in-law sings opera, and the grandfather looks after the grandson. His dreams keep taking him back to the war against Japan and to a young peasant woman whom he had then saved from a Japanese soldier. One day, he leaves alone, without telling anyone, and his son sets out to look for him.
Context
This is Hu Mei's second feature film. According to Offscreen, it is poetic and partly experimental: the flashbacks, which nothing signals, arise from the grandfather's consciousness, and the camera multiplies detail close-ups, whip pans and subjective movements. The same site reports that the army censored it and that its original versions can no longer be seen; Tony Rayns judged it more attentive to concrete things than Chen Kaige's The Big Parade. It is described as the first Chinese psychological film.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and a half, which moves freely between the present and memories; no French release is established.
Prizes and reception
It won awards at foreign festivals, which the sources do not name; the Berkeley film archive screened it in 1989.
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