Premiere | Beyond the Skies: Showing Humanity in War Poetically
This afternoon, Beyond the Skies was premiered in the Premiere section of the 24th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) Golden Goblet Awards. The film tells the story of a soldier who fought to the death for 48 hours. The film breaks the theme and narrative mode of traditional war films and integrates the characters into the mountains and rivers. The black and white film truly reflects the experience and mood changes of an ordinary soldier. After the official screening, producer Xu Xiaoming, director Liu Zhihai, producer representative Li Yue, screenwriter Zhou Jiali, photographer Mi Xinjun, and the actor Chen Weixin attended the press conference.
The creators of the film
Liu Zhihai is a professor at the China Academy of Art. He has been engaged in film teaching, directing, and planning for a long time. For his directorial debut, he expressed his unique aspirations and ideas, “Beyond the Skies is probably one of the lowest-budget films in the history of war films. I want to make this genre that people are familiar with different, to express a constant spirit from a new perspective.”
Director Liu Zhihai
After the screening of the film, many viewers said that they did not guess the end of the film at all. As Liu explained, he just wanted to keep people “guessing”, “Many audiences are used to understanding characters with their own concepts, and when the final presentation is not what they expected, they will start to think deeply from all aspects, so as to dig deeper into the ideological core of the film.”
In the past two years, more and more high-budget war films have emerged in China, but there are not many low-budget films like Beyond the Skies, which is interpreted from a small perspective. Liu Zhihai defines it as a “war literary film”, “It's a story of survival or destruction, and what we really want to talk about is humanity, not war itself.” Screenwriter Zhou Jiali added, "What we want to do is an exercise in balance, that is, how to use more limited resources to reflect unlimited energy.”
Screenwriter Zhou Jiali
Liu Zhihai has long been committed to the academic research of poetic films, and has also adopted poetic audio-visual language for Beyond the Skies, such as a large number of long lens narration, natural light and shadow in black and white, etc. The photographer Mi Xinjun said, “It is not easy to shoot long shots in the dense forest of Southwest Zhejiang at an altitude of 2 kilometers. Originally, these long shots are not difficult to shoot on the flat ground, which can be achieved with a mobile vehicle to reduce physical consumption. But that is almost impossible in the dense forest.” The crew couldn't move the equipment they had prepared before filming to the forest, and ended up shooting in a more traditional way.
The film's leading actor Chen Weixin is from Zhejiang Performing Arts Group. Beyond the Skies is also his maiden film. As the leading role for his first film, he felt more or less a little uneasy, but the crew’s adherence to “original intention” helped him slowly eliminate the uneasy feeling. “Filmmaking is an exercise in patience and stamina for everyone. Filmmakers need to have a yearning for this career. If you don't have such a yearning at the beginning, it is very difficult for you to talk about creation. It is because we have a common goal that we finish the film together.”
Leading actor Chen Weixin
Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism
