How the Beijing Film Fest Played a Crucial Role in the Career of Acclaimed Director Gu Xiaogang

Gu Xiaogang knows firsthand the impact that international film festivals can have.

Gu turned to the Beijing International Film Festival back in 2018 in an effort to get his breakthrough feature, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, made. He took his film to BJIFF’s project market and he walked away with the funds he needed after impressing investors with his story — an intimate look at a family’s life as it evolves across one year — along with his languid style.

The international film world has since felt much the same. Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains went on to become the first Chinese-language film to close Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2019, was selected among the top 10 films of the year by the leading French film magazine Cahier du Cinema in 2020 and led directly to Gu being named a co-winner of the Akira Kurosawa Award at last year’s 36th Tokyo International Film Festival, designed to honor “filmmakers who have made waves in cinema and are expected to help guide the industry’s future.”

This week, Gu is feeling a little like his life has come full circle as his latest film, Dwelling by the West Lake, has been selected as the BJIFF’s opening film as the festival begins its April 18-26 run.

“As soon as I learned that Dwelling by the West Lake had been selected as the opening film for this year’s BJIFF, it was like a reincarnation, as the BJIFF was the place where my dream first set off,” Gu says. “It feels like I was living back home [when BJIFF kick-started his career] and then I started out again, carrying with me deep expectations and encouragement.”

Dwelling by the West Lake is the first of 240 films set to screen at BJIFF across 16 curated sections and two special focuses on the “guest of honor” country Brazil and on France, marking the 50th and 60th year of diplomatic relations between China and those two nations, respectively.

The film has already struck a chord with audiences in China, with local media reporting it had taken RMB44.7 million yuan ($6.19 million) over the three-day Tomb-Sweeping Day holiday at the start of the month.

The 35-year-old Gu has also produced a short — backed by BJIFF — titled As Spring Comes Along, which celebrates life (and love) in the capital and which he describes as “clearly a love letter to cinema.”

“The BJIFF Organizing Committee has always offered great support of my creativity and trust in me and my team, so I created this love story that takes place in the Summer Palace in a beautiful spring,” explains Gu. “The story is about two old lovers seeing the past, present and future in each other’s eyes at the Summer Palace.”

The lakes, gardens and buildings inside Beijing’s Summer Palace have strong cultural significance in China, and Gu says he has used “landscapes to depict images and words in the exploration of traditions and modernity.”

Gu is also taking up a place on the jury for this year’s Forward Future award for new talent, while Beijing’s main Tiantan Award will be decided upon by a cast of international filmmakers that includes Serbian director Emir Kusturica (Underground), Australian sound designer David White (Mad Max: Fury Road) and Brazilian animator Carlos Saldanha (Ice Age: The Meltdown), alongside local stars Fei Xiang (aka Kris Phillips), Ma Li and Zhu Yilong.

There are 15 international productions in the running for the Tiantans, among them Thomas Lilti’s education system drama A Real Job from France and Israeli helmer Amit Ulman’s noir-rap-opera The City, as well as domestic productions ilike Long Fei’s drama Gold or Shit and the romantic drama I Love You, to the Moon and Back from Li Weiran.

The 69-year-old Kusturica will, meanwhile, host a workshop and masterclass that promises to “fully analyze the aesthetic style of his films, discuss how he has displayed the close connection between individuals and the nation by means of film art and feel the profound social significance and humanistic thinking behind those surreal frames.”

BJIFF opens as the Chinese film industry continues its bounce-back from the pandemic doldrums. February’s Spring Festival saw a year-on-year box office increase of 18.5 percent, with 163 million film fans spending RMB 8.016 billion ($1.1 billion) on tickets.

Beijing is keen to emphasize its position as a center of filmmaking and of the Chinese box office — the city ranked first in box office in the first quarter of the year with RMB 726 million ($100 million) in takings, while the “14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Beijing Films” has targeted the building of around 100 more cinemas for the capital by 2025, according to information supplied by BJIFF.

Beijingers — and visitors — will certainly be spoiled for choice over the next nine days. The Beijing Film Panorama program is screening films spread out across Beijing, as well as nearby Tianjin and the Xiong’an New Area, included among them Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the Denis Villeneuve directed sci-fi epic Blade Runner 2049 and the Quentin Tarantino classic Pulp Fiction.

As Gu found in 2018, the market side of BJIFF also aims to help push local and international co-productions across the finish line, and to that end organizers report 769 applications for Beijing market and project pitching sessions. Eight will be selected and offered up for potential investors, while there are plans for a physical market that is expected to host more than 100 booths representing “film and television + technology + consumption” brands covering “cultural creativity, food, wine and food” and designed to directly engage the public.

Says Yan Cui, the BJIFF Organizing Committee Office‘s spokesman: “I hope that through these updated measures and more breakthroughs, we can present a film culture feast with a higher degree of internationalization, stronger professionalism, deeper people’s participation and more prominent communication effects.”