2019-06-22

Golden Goblet Awards Competition Films | VORTEX: A Desperate Chase in Chongqing

This morning, VORTEX, one of the three Chinese films shortlisted for the Golden Goblet Awards, was unveiled. After screening, producer Cao Baoping, director Gan Jianyu, actors Dong Chengpeng, Ou Hao, Cao Bingkun, Sha Baoliang, Cao Weiyu, Ulantoya Dorai and other main creators met with the audience.

VORTEX tells the story of Liu Xiaojun who was the boss of a car repair shop resold an unlicensed car and involved in a child abduction case accidentally. His intervention broke the plan of desperate brothers Xia Xi and Xia Tao and the drinking girl Zhang Qian, which made the event out of control gradually. In this desperate police chase, the skeleton in the closet behind kidnapping gradually surfaced.

The film is exciting, interlocking and suspenseful, and the fighting and chasing were dazzling. The high-density and well-designed action scenes are also regarded as outstanding works in domestic films in recent years. In addition to crime and suspense, the film also wraps the core of warmth, shaping a group of sentient and righteous, difficulties and helpless "Nobody". From gamblers to police officers, from unlicensed car dealers to drinking girls, the characters are numerous but full, vivid and complex. The main character will be greedy for money, and the affection between the villains is touching. As actor Cao Weiyu summed it up, VORTEX shows the conflict of a group of small characters between love and justice, law and love.

The rich script lets each actor has the space to play, the most prominent role is Liu Xiaojun acted by Da Peng. As the core of the whole play, Da Peng who took off his glasses contributed different acting skills completely and shaped the humble and helpless characters at the bottom of the society successfully. For the scenes with different emotional dimensions, he also performed very well.

Li Meng, Sha Baoliang and other supporting actors also have commendable performance. Cao Bingkun, known as the "Golden Supporting Actor", said he benefited a lot from the film, "I didn\'t play a lot of movies before, till now I realize that two or three lines in the movie have so much meaning."

Some viewers said, VORTEX will remind people of A COOL FISH, because there are a group of the grassroots people crime mixed with warmth and helplessness; It will remind people of THE DEAD END, several hand-held photography action scenes clearly have the style of supervisor Cao Baoping; It also reminds people of CHONGQING HOTPOT, because it is also a crime film in Chongqing, fully showing the geographical features of Chongqing.

In response, Director Gan Jianyu said that both the script writing and the video processing when shooting are fully combined with the characteristics of Chongqing. Chongqing was chosen as the location for the film, on the one hand because director Gan Jianyu is from Chongqing, and on the other hand, the richness and complexity of Chongqing are very similar to the situation of the film\'s characters.

Therefore, in the film, one can not only see the geographical features of Chongqing endowed with the sense of space to crime genre film, a number of chase scenes to take advantage of the mountain city scattered geographical advantages, complete quite wonderful, on the other hand, water and fire elements in the film occupy a very important position. According to the director, fire symbolizes the hot character of Chongqing people, and water is used because Chongqing is the headstream of Sanjiang. In addition to the use of fire and water elements, the theme song is also Sichuan hip-hop, the whole film is full of strong Chongqing flavor.

VORTEX is produced by Cao Baoping and directed by Gan Jianyu. Cao Baoping is the "Stager" of Shanghai International Film Festival. He has not only served as a venture judge, but also won the best picture nomination of the Asian New Talent Award and the best director of the Golden Goblet Awards for TROUBLE MAKERS and THE DEAD END. Cao Baoping said he hopes to inject new blood into Shanghai International Film Festival and the Chinese film industry with this kind of support. It is reported that VORTEX is scheduled for national release on August 16.