Finalist for Golden Goblet Awards: ALL EARS: Hu Ge and “Wenshan” Perfectly Chosen for Each Other

The crews of the films competing in the Main Competition of the Golden Goblet Awards at the 25th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) have started to make their appearances. The Chinese film ALL EARS was unveiled first, with executive producer Cao Baoping, screenwriter and director Liu Jiayin, and stars Hu Ge, Wu Lei, Qi Xi and Bai Ke meeting the media. The film tells a warm and healing story, and Hu Ge said his very first feeling after reading the script two years ago was “not whether I could perform well, but I felt I was blessed with such a chance to read it, which resembles my own experiences in recent years. I was lucky to know Wenshan in the script – someone who is warm and healing when you need someone to be.”

In the film, Wenshan, an ordinary scriptwriter who has “fallen behind in his career,” starts writing eulogies for a living by chance. He comforts the people he encounters, despite their backgrounds, and gains warmth from them, eventually finding his own path in life. The film is a vivid snapshot of director Liu Jiayin’s search for answers to the balance between oneself and the rest of the world in over 10 years. “I also visited Babaoshan and the zoo a lot. A lot of times, I would think about what kind of life I would lead there and, for example at Babaoshan, I would imagine what I could do and what I need to do, and from that I created this role.”

In the film, Hu Ge portrays an introverted observer who “occasionally smiles because he is happy, and looks less happy because everything is okay.” Hu Ge says that when he first tried to play the character, he was genuinely concerned about finding a concrete reference in real life, as the character did not match his previous experience of performance at all. “When I failed to do so, I would be unsure of myself and afraid that I wouldn’t be able to recreate such a role accurately,” he said.

Ultimately, this somewhat healing story reminded Hu of his own experiences in recent years. After his mother passed away in 2019, “I never had the courage to face up to it, and I was lucky to know Wenshan in this way. In fact, this role has kept healing and warming me, and I was always shifting between Wenshan and the characters healed by him.” 

Working with Hu Ge for the third time, it was Wu Lei who played the role of Wenshan’s inner voice in the film. For Wu Lei, who has started to experiment with author films, this work is also a new challenge, as sometimes the character is not that “explicitly defined,” and, at the same time, he has to echo Hu Ge’s performance. As a persona waiting to be created in the film, Wu Lei says that Xiao Yin is waiting for a better way out, “That is just akin to myself, and to many young people, who yearn for a better future.”

In Hu Ge’s view, the relationship between the role of Wenshan and director Liu Jiayin is just like that between Xiao Yin, played by Wu Lei, and Wenshan. Liu Gayin, who has fused a lot of her own experiences and emotions into this work, confessed that when she first wrote the script, Wenshan’s face was always blurred until the moment the film shooting started: “It was like magic. He seemed to have stolen Wenshan from me, and I could see clearly Wenshan’s face from then on.”