SIFF World Express | ALL EARS and MAY Premiere at Tokyo International Film Festival

The films ALL EARS and MAY, recommended by Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), have been nominated for the World Focus section of the 36th Tokyo International Film Festival. ALL EARS competed in the main competition section of the 25th SIFF and director Liu Jiayin won the Best Director honor at the Golden Goblet Awards, while actor Hu Ge (jointly) was awarded the Best Actor. MAY was selected for the Asian New Talent section of the 25th SIFF and director Luo Dong was honored the Best Director award in that section. These two films will soon appear at the Tokyo International Film Festival through SIFF World Express, to showcase the new strength of outstanding contemporary Chinese-language films.

Poster of ALL EARS

The film tells the story of a down-and-out screenwriter, Wen Shan (played by Hu Ge), who starts writing eulogies for people by chance. In his interactions with various clients, Wen Shan and the clients heal each other and eventually find their own life direction.

During the process of writing eulogies, Wen Shan encounters clients of all kinds, including Mr. Wang (played by Huang Lei) and the siblings from the Wan’s family (played by Hu Yaozhi and Zhao Qian), who reserve eulogies for loved ones, Shao Jinsui (played by Qi Xi), who seeks justice for a deceased internet friend, and the entrepreneur Lao Lu (played by Gan Yunchen), who requests a eulogy for a colleague. There is also Aunt Fang (played by Na Renhua), who asks for a eulogy service for herself. Along Wen Shan’s journey of growth, in addition to his companion Xiao Yin (played by Wu Lei), there is also his teacher (played by Sun Chun), his friend Pan Congcong (played by Bai Ke), who works at the funeral home, and a zookeeper (played by Yang Qingsheng) with his own story. By writing eulogies, Wen Shan achieves mutual healing with his clients, eventually overcoming internal conflicts and finding himself again. In the words of director Liu Jiayin, this is a “story about how to overcome the anxiety of creation and how to accept oneself during the process of growth.”

Poster of MAY

Directed by Luo Dong and produced by Zhou Xun, the Shanghainese film MAY focuses on the emotional lives of the elderly and tells the story of an aunt in Shanghai in her seventies who crosses half of the city every day in search of love. Luo Dong, a former still photographer for Hong Kong director Guan Jinpeng’s films, directs this film, his second work, set in a blurred realm of reality and narrative reconstruction. The film is entirely in Shanghainese dialect and casts lens on the aunt’s housing problem and various absurd blind dates through the storylines both veiled and unveiled.

“I have been paying attention to the elderly in this age group for a long time, and as I matured, my feelings for this generation deepened. So, I decided to shoot a narrative film about their spiritual lives,” said Luo Dong. For this purpose, Luo Dong interviewed retired individuals from various backgrounds, such as painters and dancers, until he met seventy-year-old Yu Mei. Her expressive power and desire to perform gave Luo Dong the motivation to capture her story. With beautiful close-up shots, the film visits ballrooms, IKEA, chess rooms, parks, and other social venues for elderly people in Shanghai, humorously documenting her and her friends’ lives in old age and revealing another side of the bustling metropolis.

The Tokyo International Film Festival is an international competitive feature film festival. It was first held in 1985 for the first time and takes place from late October to early November each year. The 36th Tokyo International Film Festival will be held from October 23rd to November 1st.

As the only international competitive feature film festival in China, SIFF, taking its advantages as international platform for long, is committed to ramping up support for outstanding Chinese-language films. Since its official inception in 2015, the SIFF World Express project has been carefully selecting outstanding works from the competition and screening sections and bringing them to major international film festivals on a regular basis, to promote the overseas distribution of Chinese films. At the same time, great support has been given to potential projects that have been shortlisted by SIFF PROJECT in the international film market, to further boost co-production negotiations and overseas presales, paving the way for more excellent Chinese-language films distributed overseas to tell Chinese stories, and spread the voice of China.