A Seville Pictures / New Yorker Films release Sunflower CREDITS Director ZHANG YANG Screenplay ZHANG YANG CAI SHANGJUN HUO XIN Producer PETER LOEHR 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 China Film Group Corp and Ming Productions A Fortissimo Films presentation 2 CAST Zhang Gengnian (Father) SUN HAIYING Zhang Xiuqing (Mother) JOAN CHEN 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.