Director's statement

Before Shooting
December 2005

An imaginary landscape as the main character – that’s what I want to present in this film. And then I need a man, or a man’s voice rather than my own voice, to take us into this imaginary landscape, where the audience can paint their own imaginary reality.

I want to set this imaginary landscape in a village on the border between China and Russia, a place Chinese schoolchildren know of, called Mohe. Mohe is the mythical northernmost point of China, where one can see beautiful northern lights – that’s what is written in our school textbooks.

I want to introduce this place in an unusual way: to look at it through this man - my scriptwriter friend Rao Hui. He is a writer who really writes, a writer who has an uneventful writer’s life, because he only writes but doesn’t live. He has been stuck in his flat since the day he came to Beijing, and he has spent his days and nights creating stories set in remote places he has never been to. Following his imagination, the narrative of the film will twist and turn and reshape itself constantly, as the scriptwriter changes his ideas about the places and problems of his characters.

Let’s come back to the imaginary landscape. Ever since Rao Hui and I were students at the Beijing Film Academy, he has always kept talking about specific places he’s been reading about in his favourite novels. For example, Patrick Modiano’s book Dimanches d’Aout is set in Nice in France. Because he loves that novel so much, he dreams of spending his life in that French town, so remote from Beijing, and he is prepared to work very hard and save money so he’ll be able to sunbathe on the beach of Nice when he grows old. Will that day ever come?