Filmmaker’s Style:

Director: Huo Jianqi

Great minds mature slowly, Subtle auteur, Quest for answers
As a popular Chinese saying goes, "Great minds mature slowly." Huo Jianqi showed his talent for directing movies very late.

The amateur burst onto the international scene in 1998, at the age of 40, with the release of the impressive, heart-warming, small-budget production Postman in the Mountains (Nashan, Naren, Nagou). It is perhaps for that reason that Huo is frequently addressed by many as a "young director," despite the fact that he is actually the peer of the country's famous "fifth generation." In fact, many paramount fifth generation directors who are currently dominating Chinese cinema, for example Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, were his schoolmates back in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Beijing Film Academy.

But after a series of thought-provoking pictures and a dozen awards from major domestic and international film festivals, nobody can deny that the late comer has ranked himself among the best Chinese directors.


Subtle auteur

He is mild and moderate, more like a writer than a director.
"I was not meant to be a director," said Huo, but added that depicting the subtle inner world of human beings like writers do in novels has long been where his interest lies.

He attended Beijing Film Academy in 1978, at the age of 20, major in fine arts. Zhang Yimou was also registered that year. Between 1982 and 1992, Huo worked as art director on numerous color features at the Beijing Film Studio, including Tian Zhuangzhuang's Horse Thief (Daoma Zei), one of the best movies that China has ever produced.
In 1995, Huo made his directorial debut with The Winner (Ying Jia), which won several critical awards in China. The play was written by his wife Qiu Shi, an MA graduate of Beijing Normal University. "I was yearning to shoot my own movies, but I had no money to employ playwrights, so I had to let her write them," Huo said. Following that, he continued to deliver The Singer (Ge Shou, 1996), Postman in the Mountains (1998), A Love of Blueness (Lanse Aiqing, 2000) and Life Show (Shenghuo Xiu, 2003). The scripts of these movies were all written by Qiu Shi.

All the works have at least one thing in common they all focus on sincere relationships between people. Together, they establish a unique unaffected style with a minimum of the theatrical elements.
Huo's third work, Postman in the Mountains, is the one which brought him international reputation.
It won a trio of awards, including best picture and best actor, at China's top Golden Rooster movie awards.
It achieved greater success in Japan, becoming a box office hit and the talk of the town. So far it has raked in at least 800 million yen (US$7.3 million) in Japan.


Quest for answers

While most other directors are devoted to making blockbusters, hoping to copy Hollywood's commercial miracles, Huo is one of the few who strives to find answers to questions engendered during China's transition from a traditional society into a modern, Western-styled hurried society. Huo's two latest works, Life Show and Nuan continues this tradition. Nuan, which won the Tokyo Grand Prix, the Governor of Tokyo Award, at the 16th Tokyo International Film Festival last November. All the movies convey sentiments that seem to arise from deep inside the characters, overflowing to the surface. Huo believes that it is his inward character that contributes to the exquisite sensitivity in his movies. Huo said his life experience has also exerted some subtle or even undetectable influence on his personality, and then his movies.

"I was born and brought up in Beijing. Before I graduated from university, I seldom left the city," said Huo. “I was brought up in a courtyard not far away from the Forbidden City. During my childhood, I rambled about Tian'anmen Square, Jingshan Park, Qianmen and the Working People's Cultural Palace - places that bear the remains of China's ancient history and tradition.” "I swam in the Moat in summer and skated on it in winter. That was a time that I will never forget,  my life has been very smooth, filled with few frustrations and cruelty. Maybe that is why the characters and plots in my movies are so sincere and heart-warming."

"I have an instinct to yearn for purity and neatness, and to disgust frightfulness," said Huo.

It is that instinct that distinguishes his movies from other directors' works.

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