Chinese painter and filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong began shaping his new film during the pandemic.
With the world suddenly forced to pause, he tells Variety, people felt an urgent desire to return to everyday life and to gather around a table.
That idea became the starting point for “Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting,” which is competing at the Tokyo International Film Festival. The film connects four eras through food and shared meals, with each chapter approaching the pleasure of eating, and its meaning, through its own fantastical vocabulary. An opening title card presents “Fuxi” as a phrase that evokes both the delight of food and the act of eating.
Lee Kang-sheng worked with several dialect coaches, Qiu says. “I was drawn to the mysterious quality about him, which felt perfectly suited to a character from ancient times,” he says. “That gave me the idea of asking him to play a woman.”
Unlike Qiu’s previous feature, “A New Old Play,” which focused on an individual’s personal history, “Fuxi” unfolds in sequence across four eras through four short stories. Qiu says he used the meals at the center of each chapter to approach questions of life and death.
“Through the individual lives of the characters, I wanted to explore a kind of relativity specific to this film – the relationship between the large and the small, or between a meal and the sun and the moon,” he says.
Lee Kang-sheng, whose work in Tsai’s “Walker” series has drawn international attention, has just wrapped filming on Argentine director Iván Fund’s science-fiction film “Bodies of Summer.” Asked what he might like to try after taking on dialect-heavy dialogue and female roles, he says he usually lets roles find him.
