Chinese writer and director Zhu Xin was born in 1996, but, still in his 20s, he has already made a name for himself on the global film festival circuit with well-received low-budget independent movies.
The 15th edition of the Beijing International Film Festival, which opened on April 18 and runs through Saturday, has just put the spotlight on him with a “Filmmaker in Focus” program that lauded him as “the young flag-bearer of the ‘Hangzhou New Wave’,” or Hangzhou New Cinema, named after the picturesque city in Southeastern China where he has grown up.
Zhu graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2018, the same year when his debut feature Vanishing Days debuted at the Busan International Film Festival before screening in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum program. Made with a non-professional cast on a tiny budget, the movie about a teenager’s surreal experiences during one summer raised eyebrows with its trance-like aesthetic.” THR‘s review touted that the film as marking “the emergence of an artist with an audacious vision.”
The filmmaker’s second feature was the experimental documentary A Song River, a journey through space and time described in a synopsis this way: “To find the hometown in his memories, Zhu Xin tries to restore a Song Dynasty poem.”
Zhu’s latest feature, All Quiet at Sunrise, explores love, language, time, and memory. It was featured at the Beijing festival along with his two other features and five shorts.
In between his busy festival schedule, Zhu took time to talk about All Quiet at Sunrise, his influences, and his future plans.
All Quiet at Sunrise, which Parallax Films is selling, continues the auteur’s exploration of time and space, as well as human language and communication more broadly. It tells the story of a research student looking to find the origin of language by studying “Lucy,” the early primate that has been described as “the grandmother of mankind,” while navigating his relationship with his mother.
China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1979 until 2015 to curb population growth by limiting most families to one child, is one topic the young filmmaker says his current cinematic creations deal with.
“Our generation is of the one-child policy,” Zhu tells THR. “So, we are the only children of our parents. This film starts from the relationship between me and my mother, because I am the only child, so we have some strong bonds. And similar to the [characters in the] film, she also sometimes didn’t quite know what I was doing at that moment in time. Maybe she felt a little bit confused about my career, my job, maybe even my girlfriend. She didn’t know everything about me because I tried to hide things about myself also.”
Zhu loved addressing this via an imagined, maybe even at times fantastical, story, or “science fiction,” as he calls it. The idea for that came when he heard news of a dead girl’s body having been found in the mountains along with a camera with pictures of trees. “They were trying to figure out what those photos were about, but had no clue,” the director says. “I thought maybe it’s a metaphor. The human race uses machines but maybe we just forget how to use a very simple method and the emotion of our heart.”
In that sense, the movie “allowed me to have a story to maybe talk about that relationship with my mother,” he explains. “My mother and I have a very strong bond, but we cannot express our love very directly. So maybe I had to use such a fantasy to show the deep love inside my heart.”
Asked about his films’ poetic atmosphere and multiple dimensions, Zhu tells THR that he originally wanted to create comic books and that he likes to make movies “with different layers,” explaining that his mind also tends to cover a lot of ground: “Sometimes I think of one thing and then another thing which is very far from the first and maybe is a random thing,” he shares. “And this may sometimes be stuff that is influenced by my childhood.”
Producer Wang Shimiao notes that Zhu Xin is also clearly inspired by his hometown. “We are the same age and we’ve been friends for a long time,” she tells THR. “And to me, Hangzhou, the city where he grew up, is a huge part of his inspiration. Because if his stories didn’t take place in Hangzhou, they would not be Zhu Xin stories.”
What makes it so exciting to work with Zhu? “He is really creative, really spontaneous, really interesting,” she shares.
Zhu seems to have boundless creative energy, telling THR that he has already shot another film that is in the editing stage. “It is called One-Child Memo in English” and explores “the sadness of our generation,” which grew up amid the one-child policy, “but using comedy,” he says.
Given the lack of a major film industry in Hangzhou, Zhu and his collaborators are used to making small-budget indie movies but he is ready to go bigger.
“He is trying to make his way to the mainstream film industry, because he is not just an independent filmmaker, and we also want to really make films for the mass audience to see in film theaters,” highlights Wang.
This writer is not surprised to hear that Zhu already has at least one idea ready. “I had a project at the Rotterdam CineMart in 2020 called Who Is Sleeping on My Pillow,” he tells THR. “But this is a very big project which crosses the border of mainland China and also maybe includes a European country,” and would need much more financing than he has used so far, he explains.
“Lu Mingming’s mother fell ill all of a sudden,” an online synopsis for the movie reads. “Her family had to take turns looking after her.” But when Lu Mingming also dies, the family decides “to conjure up a story to hide the truth, writing weekly replies in Lu Mingming’s stead.”
Shares Zhu: “It’s like a family detective story. Because of COVID, I could not shoot that film, but the script is finished. Maybe I will continue to make this film.”