A Seville Pictures / New Yorker Films release Sunflower

CREDITS

Director Screenplay ZHANG YANG SHANGJUN HUO XIN Producer Producer HAN SANPING Co-producers MICHAEL J. WERNER WOUTER BARENDRECHT Executive Producer YANG BUTING Co-executive Producer JIANG TAO Production Supervisor SHI DONGMING Production Management ZHAO HAICHENG Line Producer ER YONG Production Manager ZHANG JIAKUN Director of Photography JONG LIN Editor YANG HONGYU Production Design AN BIN HUANG XINMING Music LIN HAI Music Production LIN HAI, EMOTION MUSIC STUDIO Music performed by ASIA PHILHARMONIC GROUP (STRINGS) HUANG LIJIE (LEAD VIOLIN) LIN HAI (SOLO PIANO) Music Recording & Mixing LOU WEI Sound Design WU LALA Sound Editors MAO SHUO ZHAO YING WANG GANG Foley Mixer CHENG XIAOLONG First Assistant Director LI HAIBIN

For Fourth Production Company of Film Group Corp and Ming Productions A Fortissimo Films presentation

2 CAST

Zhang Gengnian (Father) SUN HAIYING Zhang Xiuqing (Mother) Lao Liu LIU ZIFENG Xiangyang (9 yrs old) ZHANG FAN Xiangyang (19 yrs old) GAO GE Xiangyang (32 yrs old) WANG HAIDI Chicken Droppings (9 yrs old) HONG YIHAO Chicken Droppings (19 yrs old) LI BIN Han Jing (Xiangyang’s wife) LIANG JING Yu Hong ZHANG YUE Horn Li LI YEPING

www.NewYorkerFilms.com

Press photos are available for download through http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/nyf/t_elements/sunflower/sunflower1_t.htm

China, 2005 129 min., Color In Mandarin and English with English subtitles 1.85, Dolby SR

3 SYNOPSIS

Sunflower spans the course of three decades - focusing on the years 1976, 1987 and 1999 - in the lives of Zhang Gengnian and his son, Xiangyang.

In the years leading up to 1976, when The Cultural Revolution and the reign of the notorious ‘Gang of Four’ were coming to an end, Zhang Gengnian was an absentee father. Condemned to spending six years in a rural ‘Cadre School’ - a labor camp where he was to be politically “re- educated” - Gengnian missed Xiangyang’s formative years.

At nine-years-old, Xiangyang is having the time of his life. Nearly free of adult supervision, he spends his days mischievously roaming the streets. Gengnian, however, has his own idea about the direction that his son’s life should take and, now that he’s been released, he’s determined to make up for lost time. Most particularly, he wants Xiangyang to learn to draw, but it isn’t long before Xiangyang starts to chafe under his father’s constant rules and orders, quickly giving rise to tensions between father and son that won’t soon go away.

By 1987, Xiangyang has become an accomplished draughtsman, but his conflicts with his father seem set in stone. While he dreams of escaping his father’s clutches by running away with his girlfriend to Guangzhou, Xiangyang remains stuck at home, forced to study for the university entrance exams. Xiangyang has no idea how far his father will go to control his life in the name of “what’s best” for him, although he’ll one day discover the hurtful truth that his parents have taken away the one thing that was truly his…

Twelve years later, Beijing has become a new city, with redevelopment projects stretching to the horizon and demolition of the last remaining alleyways and courtyard housing in progress. Xiangyang has married a girl named Han Jing and his burgeoning career as a painter is about to take off with a big solo exhibition of his work. However an unplanned pregnancy that both Han Jing and Xiangyang are determined to abort leaves Gengnian reeling. Erupting over his son’s “selfish” decision to deny him a grandchild, Gengnian fails to appear at the opening of Xiangyang’s exhibition. Days later Xiangyang does find his father secretly visiting the exhibition and praising his work, but Gengnian soon disappears, leaving behind only a revelatory audio tape for his son.

Sunflower is a powerful and touching look at the compelling inner dynamics of one post-Cultural Revolution family in Beijing and their struggle over thirty years to adjust to each other as the fabric, politics, and social mores of Chinese society change ever so rapidly.

4 DIRECTOR’S NOTES

In 1976, several major incidents occurred in China. Chairman Mao passed away, the terrifying reign of the ‘Gang of Four’ was brought to an end, and a massive earthquake rocked the eastern city of Tangshan, killing 200,000 people. To most ordinary Chinese people at the time, all of this seemed to signify the end of an era. Many of those who had been oppressed and despairing during the Cultural Revolution finally saw glimmers of hope for the future.

In 1987, Deng Xiaoping launched the reform programme to ‘open up’ China, and the lives of the Chinese people began to change drastically. The 1980s and 1990s were decades of full-speed development, and the physical appearance of cities and towns also underwent a transformation. As the general standard of living began to improve dramatically, the values and general mindsets of the people underwent huge changes.

All of China was in a transition from old to new. And yet, lurking within these changes were some serious problems. Chinese people began to abandon their traditions. Many old customs began to disappear, and many parts of traditional culture seemed to have been left behind. What arrived in their place was a headlong pursuit of ‘modernity’, and an unquenchable yearning for wealth.

Having grown up during those twenty years, I personally felt the effects of this metamorphosis. I have my own views on those decades of change, and my views gradually turned into the building blocks for this film. The film divides into three ‘chapters’, set in 1976, 1987 and 1999 respectively, and it aims to show the changes that occurred during those decades. But rather than focus on historical events as such, we explore the period across the experiences of one family. The family is still the most important social unit in China, and in the conflicts and shifting relationships within the one family seen in the film we find a mirror for the changes that swept through Chinese people’s values and ways of thinking.

In this film are traces of my relationship with my own father. The relationship between father and son is often the most delicate and intense in the whole spectrum of family relationships. This is true in all cultures, not just in China. All sons, while growing up, measure themselves against their fathers; conflicts are almost inevitable.

The ups and downs between father and son seen in the film over the decades represent the changes that shook their entire generations. “Father” represents China’s older, more traditional generation: the generation of intellectuals who lived through the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. The son “Xiangyang” represents the wave of young people who grew to maturity after China had launched its economic reforms. These young people were therefore products of a transitional period in history, and they were filled with yearning for a new way of life.

This film will portray ordinary Chinese life in detail, as well as showing the physical transformation of the country’s cities. It will be a historical homage to ordinary people and will give viewers a glimpse of the thoughts and hopes of Chinese people over three decades of social transformation.

-Zhang Yang

5 AN INTERVIEW WITH ZHANG YANG

Many viewers will sense that they’re watching the story of your own life in Sunflower. Exactly how autobiographical is it?

The thirty-year-long conflict between father and son is very close to the reality of my relationship with my father, but the overall story in the film is made up. The father’s job, the mother’s character, the formative events, that’s all fictional. But a lot of the small details are based on memories from my childhood in the 1970s: the children’s games, for example. The father-son conflict is obviously a key element in the script, but I didn’t want to focus the entire film on that. I also wanted to show the larger changes in society during those thirty years, and the boy’s journey from childhood to manhood.

The film does show social change, very vividly, but it doesn’t go into much detail about the political context in China. For example, you don’t fully explain how or why the father got sent to ‘Cadre School’ during the Cultural Revolution period, which is coming to an end as the film begins. Were you deliberately avoiding politics?

I certainly didn’t want to focus the film on politics. Families are a constant, whatever the political climate, and the family is my real focus. I set out to show China’s political changes from the perspective of the boy – who, like me, was born in the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution meant something very different to kids of my generation than it did to our parents. I was nine when it ended with the arrest and imprisonment of the ‘Gang of Four’, and my own memories of the period are quite rosy: parents were away, schools were closed, there was lots of time to play, lots of freedom. So the Cultural Revolution in the film is mostly shown as the boy sees it.

What led you to 1976, 1987 and 1999, the three specific years the story is set in?

I had to cut the story down to size somehow, and so I tried to choose the most representative year from each of those three decades. For someone of my age, 1976 was a key year: the Tangshan earthquake, the death of Mao and the arrest of the ‘Gang of Four’ were all indelible events. So that year was a natural choice. I went for 1987 because it’s the year when the boy finishes high school and faces the decision whether or not to try for university. The choice was more to do with the character than with the events of that year. And I chose 1999 because that was the year we began work on the script! No, I’m joking. It hasn’t really taken that long. But 1999 was probably the year when my own life reached the point it’s at now.

With , which dealt with your real-life friendship with , and now this film, your work seems to be becoming more and more personal. Do you see it that way yourself?

The key thing for me in all four films I’ve made is that they should say what I want them to say. This film may draw on my personal experiences more than the earlier ones did, but many people have told me that they relate to it because it also directly echoes their own experiences. I guess what I’m saying is that the personal dimension matters less than the universality of it.

6 Given the extraordinary pace of change in China, it must be hard to find locations that conjure up even the quite recent past. Is that why you shot much of the film in the studio?

It would be impossible to film this script on location in present-day Beijing. We did try to find suitable locations, but even the city roads look completely different now. We shot the big scene of the anti-Gang of Four parade the other day, and even that had to be done in the studio; the street where the actual parade took place simply doesn’t exist any more. Even when we did find a potentially useable spot, by the time we returned to look at it again more often than not we’d find that someone had started demolishing the old buildings. Some other movies set in Beijing’s recent past have been shot in other cities, places that have changed less than Beijing has. But we were lucky enough to be able to build the main sets we needed inside Beijing Film Studio. That made it much easier for us.

Catching the changes in the city is a very important aspect of the film, and so I was on the art department’s back throughout the shoot. The background detail is constantly changing, and I tried to make it as accurate as I could. I’m from Beijing myself, and I think you’ll see my nostalgia for the Beijing that has already vanished clearer in this film than you did in Shower. I hope the film’s account of the city’s development is properly ambivalent. The mother, for example, spends much of the film longing to move from the old courtyard house into a modern apartment. When she finally gets her wish, we can see that the new place is cleaner and bigger – but is it better?

The sunflowers which appear in the film (and give it its title) seem to have some metaphorical value. Do you feel like spelling out what they stand for?

I don’t want to be too clear about it. One thing is that they represent growth; their growth parallels the boy’s. Another is that they evoke the symbolism of the 1970s, when Chairman Mao was identified as China’s sun and the people were seen as basking in his light. But when the father sows sunflower seeds, it’s fairly clear that he takes the plants as surrogates for the son he wishes he had. Anyhow, the film’s sunflowers aren’t strictly symbolic of anything in particular. Their meaning is more emotional than symbolic.

-Beijing, 8 May 2004 Interview by Tony Rayns, translated by Peter Loehr

7 AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER LOEHR

Sunflower is the inaugural film of your new company Ming Productions. What led you to start the company and what are your ambitions for it?

Between 1996 and 2001, I ran the production company Imar in Beijing and produced five features. Imar was set up make low-budget films (around RMB 3m per film), with one eye on the developing domestic market in China and the other on international sales. Our track record was pretty good: all five films we made ended up first or second on the list of domestic box-office hits for their years, and we succeeded in selling the films abroad. Shower, in particular, was an international hit both critically and commercially. Imar’s deal with its investors was to produce five features. Once we’d fulfilled that contract, it seemed like it was time to move on. This project, Sunflower, was already in our minds, and it clearly didn’t fit the Imar mould: too ambitious, too expensive. So it needed a different production context.

Making films in China has both advantages and disadvantages. It seems to me that there are three main advantages. First, the country and its culture are full of terrific stories that haven’t yet been told. Second, there’s a huge pool of untapped talent here: directors, cinematographers, designers, actors … Third, costs are still relatively low, the industry isn’t yet plagued with agents, lawyers and managers. That means that whatever you spend ends up on the screen, not in someone’s pocket.

Equally, though, there are disadvantages to working here. For one thing, there are very few good screenwriters in China. For another, there’s only very limited access to international finance, which makes it hard to set up co-productions. Even more seriously, the market here is in disarray. The distribution system is antiquated and inflexible, and piracy is still rampant.

So, my ambitions at Ming are to make use of those strengths and advantages and to work around those weaknesses and disadvantages. We’ll spend whatever time it takes to get our scripts right, and we’ll use international financing to get the most from production opportunities here. Our experience at Imar was invaluable in that respect. Low-budget production in China is obviously the cornerstone for higher-budgeted production, and so Imar gave us a great learning curve. We’re now in a good position to explore the gap that still exists between domestic grosses and international grosses.

We have two projects on the table right now. One is Sunflower, which is essentially a Chinese film by a Chinese director, but hopefully one with global appeal. The other is an experiment, an attempt to do a big-budget Chinese-themed film in English. It’s called Murder in Canton, and it’s based on one of Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries. John McTiernan is interested in directing it. It will be an expensive, historical production, but it’s not a cast-driven film, and so the budget doesn’t need to cover any of the established English-speaking Chinese stars.

What made you decide to go with Sunflower first?

Zhang Yang and I started talking about this film even before we’d finished making Quitting, which was the last Imar production. We’ve worked together since 1996: his first film as director was my first film as producer. After making four films together, we’ve reached the point where neither of us can imagine working without the other. When he first told me his ideas for this film, the aspect that first hooked me was the challenge of showing how fast China has changed in the

8 last few decades. This country probably has the fastest pace of change anywhere in the world, and I’d seen the changes of the last ten years myself. As we spent time talking about it, developing the storyline and fleshing out the characters, I got even more into it. I related to the characters and felt close to the issues the story raised.

What were the main logistical challenges?

The budget is equal to those of all three of Zhang Yang’s previous features put together, but it wasn’t hard to raise: both Zhang Yang and I have a good track record, in that our films have always come in on schedule and on budget, and have always made a profit. One third of our investment this time comes from China Film Corporation, the country’s longest established distributor, and so we’re guaranteed good domestic distribution for the film. We are also a large investment from the sales company Fortissimo, which indicated their confidence that the film can be sold internationally.

Our budgets on the Imar films never allowed us the luxury of shooting in a studio. For this project, though, the studio was essential. Suitable locations for this story simply don’t exist any more in Beijing, so we had to build the main sets. Not only build them, but knock them down (to show the effects of the Tangshan earthquake), rebuild them and adapt them to show their evolution over the decades. And we had to come up with costumes and props from the 1970s and 1980s, which is not easy or cheap. And we were able to cast an internationally known star, Joan Chen.

As I said, it wasn’t too hard to raise the budget for the film. The hard part was getting everything right.

- Beijing, 9 May 2004 Interview by Tony Rayns

9 Biographies / Filmographies

ZHANG YANG (Director/co-writer)

Zhang Yang was born in Beijing. His father is the film director Zhang Huaxun. He graduated in 1992 from the directing department of the Central Drama Academy in Beijing, and attracted widespread attention in theatre circles soon after with a Chinese production of Kiss of the Spiderwoman. In the following years, in addition to theatre work, he directed more than 20 underground music videos. In 1996 he teamed up with the American producer Peter Loehr, who had just launched the independent film company Imar in Beijing. Their first collaboration on the comedy-drama marked the start of an enduring partnership that has already led to three further features: Shower (1999), Quitting (2001) and now Sunflower.

PETER LOEHR (Producer)

A native New Yorker, Peter Loehr worked for the Japanese entertainment conglomerate Amuse in the fields of music, television and film – first in Tokyo, subsequently in Taiwan. While based in Taipei, he secured investment from the music company Rock Records for an independent film production company to be based in Beijing.

Founded in 1996, Imar Film Co Ltd was modern China’s first genuinely independent film company, producing, distributing and marketing its films entirely in-house. The company produced five features, three directed by Zhang Yang and two by Shi Runjiu. The inaugural production Spicy Love Soup swept the domestic film awards in 1998. A Beautiful New World premiered in the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999. Shower (1999) won a total of 11 awards in nine different festivals. All the Way (2000) premiered in Rotterdam Film Festival. And Quitting (2001) was invited to the Venice, Toronto, Vancouver, Sundance and Rotterdam festivals. All five films were in the top two grossing titles of their years in China.

Loehr was nominated as one of Variety’s “Ten Producers to Watch” in 1999. After leaving Imar, he launched Ming productions in 2002. The company aims to produce Asian-themed films on a larger scale for a global audience.

JOAN CHEN (as Xiuqing, Xiangyang’s Mother)

Joan Chen was born in Shanghai. She was admitted to the Shanghai Film Studio’s Actor Training Program in 1975. Immediately after graduating, she was chosen to star in the film Youth by the famous veteran director Xie Jin. She went on to star in Little Flower, which won her the Best Actress prize in China’s Film Awards in 1980. She was an instant favorite of the Chinese audience and became known as “China’s Elizabeth Taylor”.

She left China for the USA in 1981 to study filmmaking, and graduated with honors from California State University, Northridge. She resumed her acting career with roles in Taipan, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, the multiple Academy Award-winning The Last Emperor, Blood of Heroes, Turtle Beach, Golden Gate and Heaven and Earth. She also starred as the enigmatic Josie Packard in David Lynch’s ground-breaking TV series “Twin Peaks”. She returned to Shanghai in 1993 to star in Stanley Kwan’s Red Rose, White Rose, based on the celebrated novel by Eileen Chang. Her role as the sultry, lovelorn Red Rose, White Rose won her Best Actress awards in both Taipei and . Her recent appearances on screen have included the

10 American film What’s Cooking? (the opening film of the 2000 Sundance Film Festival) and the Chinese film Jasmine (a directorial debut by acclaimed cinematographer Hou Yong).

Joan fulfilled a long-term ambition when she directed her own first film in 1997. Xiu Xiu: The Sent-down Girl premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999 and went on to be released in many countries. The film won her the National Board of Review’s International Freedom of Expression award in 2000. Her second feature as director was MGM’s Autumn in New York, starring Richard Gere and Winona Ryder.

She was drawn to Sunflower, she explains, by the sincerity of Zhang Yang’s script. “I immediately recognized the truth of the story,” she says, “and so did the friends and relatives I discussed it with. Obviously the story has strong personal meanings for Zhang Yang, but all Chinese who have lived through the last thirty years of rapid changes will find echoes of their own experiences in it. The mother is not a hard role for me to play, since I know exactly what she feels and what she’s all about. All I have do is let go of my vanity!”

“The longest I’ve ever been away from China was from 1981 to 1985, my first four years in America. My home and family are in San Francisco, but I’ve been back to China very often since the mid-1980s, and so I’ve seen all the changes at first hand. The quality of life in China has certainly improved, and I’m both shocked and encouraged by the young generation that has no shame about their desires. But it sometimes seems that everyone in China has surrendered to hedonism and greed, and there’s no doubt that traditional family structures have broken down. Parenting is different now. It’s not uncommon for children to be sent away to boarding schools at a very young age.”

“The American film industry is amazing. It’s like a huge and very efficient machine designed to deliver a product. It’s a great feeling to ride that machine, and it’s great to work in such an organized way. But a director is watched so closely by the production executives and financiers that it’s almost impossible to think of the film as your own work. Chinese production is far more ramshackle, more like working with a large family. But in China the director really is the boss. In China, you really can think of the director as the author of the film.”

SUN HAIYING (as Zhang Gengnian, Xiangyang’s Father)

Sun Haiying, 48, has been a prolific actor on stage, on television and in the movies since the 1970s. He has become one of the best-known leading men of his generation in China. He comes from a theatrical family (father a theatre director, mother an actress), and, when pressed, admits that the stage remains his first love – “with film a close second.”

He became nationally popular playing the father of a military family in the TV series “Jiqing Ranshao Suiyue”, a role that won him an Audience Award in the respected Golden Eagle Television Awards. He went on to star in eight more popular drama serials screened by China’s most-watched national broadcaster CCTV, including “Shediao Yingxiong Zhuan “and “Xiao’ao Jianghu,” the latter based on the famous martial arts novel “Swordsman” by Jin Yong.

His many film appearances include Gaoyuan Rumeng and Meili de Dajiao; the latter won him another Audience Award in the 2002 Golden Rooster Film Awards. He was recently seen as a senior policeman in the film Goddess of Mercy, made in China by the Hong Kong director Ann Hui.

11 Sun jumped at the chance to play Xiangyang’s father as soon as he read the script. “I was very surprised by the scenario,” he recalls. “I hadn’t read anything like that for a long time. I thought that such thoughtful and humane scripts were extinct! We’re surrounded by chaos these days, and in my experience it’s rare to come across something so pure and direct in such an unstable world.”

“I’m from an older generation than Zhang Yang’s, but I felt an immediate empathy with the son in the film. His struggles reminded me of my own. I felt a strong empathy. The script reflects Zhang’s conflicts with his father, who is a film director in real life, and I found so many parallels with my own conflicts with my father, who is a theatre director. The script spans about thirty years, but my own experience suggests that its themes and issues would be just as relevant and acute if you stretched the span to sixty years!”

“I didn’t want to meet Zhang Yang’s father while preparing for the film, since there was no need to model the character on the real-life figure who inspired him. It was much more important to get to know Zhang Yang himself, to discuss the script with him and explore its implications. The more we talked, the more we realized that we were on the same page. I was confident that I could give him what he wanted.”

“Obviously, the father-son relationship is the core of the film. The son’s tragedy is that he’s never taken the time to see things from his father’s point of view – and that has a wider truth. In this hyper-driven world, people don’t take the time to think. People need to pause and reflect whether or not they’re making mistakes before it’s too late.”

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