Standing at the end of death, we will look back at how life should be more meaningful and what we should cherish. In the suburbs of Shijiazhuang, Hebei, director Liu Jiangjiang's hometown, the funeral is "big" - "it's gone" - "it's gone."

stands at the end of death, and goes back to how life should be more meaningful and what should be cherished.

Produced by | Blog World Entertainment Group

Author | Guotie

Edited by | Guge

In the suburbs of Shijiazhuang, Hebei, director Liu Jiangjiang's hometown, the funeral is said to be "big" - "it's gone" is "it's gone". Many branches of life are completely concluded in a funeral.

The term "big event" in the movie " Life Events " comes from this. This funeral-themed movie starring Zhu Yilong was officially released on June 24. second-hand rose sang at the top of his lungs in the theme song: "Go to heaven, life is nothing big before death." The background is a rumbling drum and drum. A funeral family composed of Hubei Gui Ya Mo Sanmei, Sichuan Bad Bad Bad Wu Xiaowen, Guangxi Bad Boy Wang Jianren, and Northeast Langniu Yinbaixue "Four Bad Children", faces the world's major events with impermanence and laughter and tears.

This is a funeral comedy. Unlike the sad and serious atmosphere commonly found in funeral themes, under the lens of Liu Jiangjiang, who was born in a funeral family, the funeral ceremony was filled with the heat of the city. The protagonists spoke a hot and crisp dialect, shuttled between the inside, sang, danced and shouted, and were noisy to handle funerals, and were also close to the philosophy of life and death hidden in it.

Life and death are a mirror of each other. In Liu Jiangjiang's view, the purpose of pointing the camera at death is to "standing at the end of death and going back to how life should be lived." Using death as a mirror can untie the knot that living people cannot untie.

"Big Events in Life" poster

people with stars

About Funeral , Liu Jiangjiang was familiar with it when he was young.

His ancestors are related to the funeral industry. Grandpa and uncle are both carpenters who specialize in coffins. As a child's memory, the yard of my home is always filled with various coffins made of fish fillets, mulberry locust trees, pine wood, cypress wood, cypress wood, and other materials. Whenever there is a funeral in all corners, grandpa will go to make a coffin for others, and grandma will tell him, "If one person dies on the ground, there will be one more star in the sky." People who are engaged in the funeral industry plant stars in the sky.

In the eyes of children, this kind of ritual surrounding death is not terrible. He followed his grandfather to attend the funeral and saw "delicious, fun, opera, and movies." There were very few literary and artistic activities in rural areas at that time. Looking back now, Liu Jiangjiang felt that it was the things that happened in the ire of the world that became his literary and artistic enlightenment.

Before becoming a film director, Liu Jiangjiang produced the column drama "This Something in the Village" for the TV station. This program is based on rural life and tells real life stories about parents' family affairs, food, food, oil and salt. Liu Jiangjiang has been filmed for 17 years. Out of interest in funerals, he had come into contact with many funerals during that period and wrote several stories about funerals.

In 2017, the TV program was suspended and Liu Jiangjiang moved into the film industry. He always had a thought in his mind, which was to make a funeral-themed movie, but he felt that he had not found a tool for a long time - he lacked a core to connect the funeral stories accumulated over the years.

17 years of experience in TV stations have made him pursue authenticity almost instinctively. In 2018, he went to Baiyangdian to collect folk songs, and a story caught him: One summer, a child accidentally sank into the water, and rescuers went down three groups of people, but unfortunately they were unable to save the child. The last one went down was a big brother from a corpse-catching team. He risked his life to sneak into the water and fished the child's body up.

It was the moment when he heard the story, Liu Jiangjiang's heart sank, feeling that he "suddenly understood the highlights of this profession", and he finally found that grasp.

Zhu Yilong (right) plays Mo Sanmei

Really started writing in March 2019.One evening when he got off work, Liu Jiangjiang saw a truck parked at the entrance of the funeral and funeral shop next to the TV station, moving wreaths, urns and other supplies. Next to the coffee table in the store was sitting, a little girl doing her homework.

This is an unusual picture, and in Liu Jiangjiang's view, "has a feeling of spring." He found the theme he wanted to write in this picture and immediately finished the first edition. In "The Great Events of Life", there is also a funeral shop "Going to Heaven", and there is also a little girl in the store. The one who makes up this store is a "star family", and they are several people who "plant stars in the sky". The background of the story is life, warmth and fireworks.

Before the filming of "The Great Events in Life", Liu Jiangjiang had asked many people to read the script, and many of the guiding opinions were to delete the children's plays in moderation, "Otherwise, the execution would be a difficult problem, and you can't find such a child." But Liu Jiangjiang was very persistent. He knew that this story needs to be entered from a child's perspective, and he must have such a naive and noisy little girl full of vitality to face the big issue of life and death, which is human.

The theme of his funeral movie is locked in "growth". Not only the growth of the little girl Wu Xiaowen, but also the growth of everyone in the 4-member group.

Funeral Family

"Going to Heaven" 4-person group consists of a Wuhan family, a Sichuan baby, a Guangxi boy and a Northeast girl. They have neither blood relationship nor geopolitical relationship. Liu Jiangjiang used the word "disorder" to describe their state - they are aliens who were excluded by the original social relations, so they were free, reorganized, and re-finished.

Mo Sanmei, played by Zhu Yilong, was released from prison shortly after her sentence, and was full of ruffianism, hiding her softness and fragility with her hard and rough shell; Yin Baixue, played by Liu Lu , has a cold appearance but a fire inside; Wang Jianren, played by Wang Ge , is a small person with a cowardly and short ambition.

Wu Xiaowen, played by Yang En, is the introduction that connects everyone. She always tied two ball heads with red hair ropes, holding an red tassel gun , and appeared in a blissful manner as Nezha , with strong energy and fearlessness. In order to ask Mo Sanmei for "grandma who was put in the box", she broke into the lives of these people and also caused changes in her lives.

Yang Enyou plays Wu Xiaowen

Liu Jiangjiang was once very distressed, how to find a young actor to play a role like Wu Xiaowen. But "it may be that if this person meets a rainbow, he will know that there will be something." The young actor Yang En's performance is much beyond his imagination. On the set of filming, Yang En always performed unexpectedly by Liu Jiangjiang, and praised him as a "little genius".

Liu Jiangjiang's comment to Zhu Yilong, who plays Mo Sanmei, is "Don't be confused by his handsome appearance." Many viewers may think that Zhu Yilong's role is subversive, but in Liu Jiangjiang's view, Zhu Yilong has life experience in Wuhan and can feel the dimensions of Mo Sanmei's "rough, tender, and helpless". When he initially decided to cooperate, he felt that Zhu Yilong and Mo Sanmei had a 50% match—but this number became 90% during pre-shooting, and 100% when it was turned on.

"When the filming was completed, he was completely beyond our initial imagination, and he was a surprise." Liu Jiangjiang told "Blog World".

Wang Ge plays Wang Jianren, in Liu Jiangjiang's view, is the clown in "Shengdan Jingmo Chou" on the stage of Peking Opera . The verdict designed for this character by the script is "The person is cowardly and the ambition is short and cute, and the outside is burning and the inside is delicate and clever." The background color under its rough appearance is "cute", and it is even a bit too much childhood. Wang Ge enriched this character. He always had many small action designs on the scene, such as showing the character's anxiety and other negative emotions through the habit of biting his fingernails.

Yin Baixue, played by Liu Lu, appeared many times in the 4-person group, but most of the scenes "the focus is not on him, and there may not even be any lines."Liu Jiangjiang knew that this situation was quite difficult for actors to deal with, but Liu Lu had done this role of "not talking a lot" very well. There was a scene where several people broke up with the third brother. Yin Baixue also had no lines, but the camera console was placed in front of her. She used only a few physical movements and expressions to convey that kind of angry and distressed emotion. In Liu Jiangjiang's opinion, "She can do without lines."

Luo Jingmin (middle school) plays Lao Mo

Luo Jingmin plays Lao Mo in "The Great Events in Life", and is the father of the protagonist Mo Sanmei. When talking about him, Liu Jiangjiang couldn't help but sigh, "I can fully afford the title of old artist." He is a person who pays great attention to basic skills: for this role, Luo Jingmin followed the dialect teacher to practice Wuhan dialect word by word, and went to the park to observe the elderly in similar states, thus giving the character a sense of reality.

What surprised many people in the film is Wu Qian . Although there are not many scenes, Liu Jiangjiang feels that Wu Qian "has a very accurate state in every scene." When filming her first scene, Wu Qian said heartless words with tears in her eyes, and a heartless tone with reluctance, which made Liu Jiangjiang realize immediately, "She can handle that very complicated emotion." When filming on the set, Liu Jiangjiang especially liked to watch Zhu Yilong and Wu Qian collided in Wuhan dialect. "The rhythm is particularly satisfying," he told them at the time, "You two are definitely in the same system in Wuhan." This sense of familiarity makes the film's life more intense - and the atmosphere of life is the atmosphere that the funeral story of "The Great Events in Life".

funeral comedy

"Funeral comedy" is a prominent label of "The Great Events in Life".

Although it happened in a funeral shop, Liu Jiangjiang deliberately presented it in a "strong contrast" way. In the whole film, the funeral shop is next to the wedding shop. The funeral shop is black and white, but the stories and characters are colorful and vivid. In Liu Jiangjiang's view, he wanted to use a way closer to the audience to implant a topic that "maybe everyone doesn't talk much about it in normal times."

"There are two things in life that are the most indecent, one is birth and the other is death." Liu Jiangjiang concluded. In these two moments, people lose all their autonomy and rely entirely on the help of others. Therefore, "the doctor who delivers you and the funeral workers who send you away are also very great." Funeral practitioners were shunned, which seemed unfair to him.

Director Liu Jiangjiang and producer Han Yan

Liu Jiangjiang feels that making a movie is a matter of "learn from the best and only getting it". "It is not like the water in the sea, which can be scooped at any time. In fact, we still create in a relatively limited time and space." The original version of the movie was called "Going to Heaven". There are many funeral stories he collected during the field trip in the script, but in the end, it had to be selected and deleted and failed to be presented in the movie.

One of them impressed him and insisted on keeping it was the "Funeral of Living People". While collecting the field, Liu Jiangjiang learned that there was an old man who had never married a wife or children in his entire life. When he was about to finish, he spent all his money on holding a funeral for himself. "He wanted to see what his funeral looked like."

Liu Jiangjiang retained this story because he believed that it was related to the theme of the film, that is, "standing at the end of death, and going back to how life should be more meaningful and what should be cherished."

On the day the filming of "The Big Events in Life" was completed, the crew drank a big drink. Liu Jiangjiang felt like he was on the wedding day, which was hard to describe and mixed with flavors, as if he had "completed a major event in life, but he seemed to be standing on another starting line." He felt that he was not as excited as he thought, and he didn't even take enough photos.