Chinese director Vivian Qu is in Berlin Film Festival’s competition this year with feminist, film studios-set thriller Girls on Wire, charting the fortunes of two cousins born into China’s economic miracle of the 1990s.
Qu previously enjoyed success in Berlin as the producer of 2014 Golden Bear winner Black Coal, Thin Ice by Diao Yinan, while her second feature as a director Angels Wear White (2017) won more than 40 awards on the festival circuit having premiered in Venice.
Girls on Wire reunites Qu with actress Wen Qi (aka Vicky Chen), who got her big break in Angels Wear White and has since become a big star in China. She co-stars opposite equally buzzy actress Liu Haocun (One Second, Only Falls Rush In).
Wen Qi plays Fang Di, the older cousin who takes on physically gruelling work as a stuntwoman double in China’s largest film studios to clear family debts, while Liu Haocun, co-stars as vulnerable younger cousin Tian Tian, who falls prey to her drug-addicted father and the mob.
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Spanning some 25 years from 1997, Girls on Wire follows the women as they are reunited after a long estrangement due to the vicissitudes of their dysfunctional family in a genre mixing thriller set against the backdrop of China’s famed Xianghan Film City and the city of Chongqing in southwestern China.
When Deadline catches up with Qu in the final days of the festival, the director is still buzzing from the film’s red-carpet reception which saw hundreds of Wen Qi and Liu Hoacun fans descend on Berlin from across Europe to catch a glimpse of the stars.
“We had a three o’clock premiere but the red carpet fan area and inside the Palast, including all its levels, was packed,” she recounts.
“One of Germany’s biggest newspapers even reported on this red-carpet frenzy and some people said the screaming was louder than for Timothée,” she adds referring to the American-French star’s red carpet appearance for the German premiere of A Complete Unknown.
The response bodes well for the picture’s upcoming release in China on March 8, which is International Women’s Day, on some 1,000 screens, which Qu says is wide for an independent, elevated arthouse production.
The starting point for the feature was a research trip to Chongqing in 2018, to interview people who belong to the first generation of business owners in the 1990s, when economic reforms begun in the mid 1970s started to encourage private enterprise.
“People for the first time were allowed to have their own businesses. It was a huge thing at the time. Everybody, no matter how little or much money they had, they wanted to create a business and start the adventure. That was sort of like the beginning of the dream,” explains Qu.
“That generation people is represented in the film by Fang Di’s mother and Tian Tian’s father. That generation took a lot of risks. They had a life that’s like a reckless gambler kind of life. They had to work so hard, and the competition was so fierce. In the film, they buy samples from Guangzhou for the latest Hong Kong fashion and make duplicates in their home factory.”
It was while doing the research that Qu hit on the idea for the two young female protagonists at the heart of the thriller.
“I started noticing the children of the time who belong to the single child generation,” she says, referring to China’s Single Child Policy launched in the 1980s to put a break on rampant population growth, and since eased in 2016. “A cousin would be their closest child companion instead of a sibling, which most of them wouldn’t have.”
“I saw these pictures of not only the 1990s fashion, the colorful fabrics and clothing, but also these children. They’re crawling on the clothes piles, standing in stalls in markets, trying to help their mother to sell goods and falling asleep in a van. These interesting images, beautiful images, touching images, really drew my attention,” she continues.
“I wanted to write about these lonely children and how they grew up because their parents were too busy to properly take care of them, who could only go to their cousins for comfort.”
The film also probes the wider social impact of China’s economic boom.
“No other country had such a fast economic development in 30 years as China. We have never seen anything like that in history and it’s a very special experience, but because changes happened so fast, it had a strong impact on family values, on how people lived their lives and on the value system.”
Like Angels Wear White, in which Wen Qi plays a cleaner who witnesses a high-ranking local official sexually abusing 12-year-old schoolgirls, Girls on Wire, probes misogyny and gender equality in China.
“This story has a lot of inspiration from real-life. It’s largely based on reality, even if we situated it in the film city to make it more cinematic, but the root if it comes from reality,” says Qu.
“Society in general still has to realize that there are many problems linked to gender inequality… and I think it’s important to address these issues of how women are viewed and treated in society.
“I chose the profession of the stunt double for Fang Di as a sort of metaphor. Women make up half of the population and we made at least half of contribution in human history but how come we’re not seen?,” she continues.
“If you look read history for the last 2000 years, it’s mostly about men. Women just don’t exist in a way. We’re like the stunt double. We do all the work and then somebody gets the close-up.”
Qu’s criticism of Chinese attitudes towards women has not prevented it from securing the China Cinema Association’s permit, allowing the film to be theatrically distributed.
She suggests the body is more open to films addressing societal issues than in the past.
“There are a lot of Chinese films nowadays, that young people are making, that get the dragon stamp, as we call it. There is more room to really try to express yourself and find ways to address the kind of issues you want to address, which is why this film has that and can be released.”
The post Vivian Qu Talks Feminist Thriller ‘Girls On Wire’ & Frenzied Berlin Red Carpet As Fans Go Wild For Wen Qi & Liu Haocun: “The Screaming Was Louder Than For Timothée” appeared first on Deadline.
