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Clip description
In China’s Shandong province in 1972 three Beijing Communist Party officials (Zhi Xue Chai, Chang Suo Zhang and Jie Cheng) visit a rural school where the young pupils sing a song of praise to national leader Mao Zedong. They are looking for a student to take a special test in Qingdao and only the luckiest will be chosen. The teacher (Hui Cong Zhan) suggests Li (Wen Bin Huang). Several children run across the fields to tell Li’s parents (Joan Chen and Shuang Bao Wang) he’s been picked.
Curator’s notes
This is a crucial moment in Li’s life. The way the scene is played implies the decision to send him to Qingdao (where later scenes will show him at the dance academy) was almost pure chance – the result of his teacher’s only deciding to point him out as the last three officials left the classroom.
The scene – like all the scenes set in China – is captured by director Bruce Bereford’s regular director of photography Peter James in steely greys and icy blues, giving a sense not only of the coldness of the climate (it’s clearly winter) but also of a forbidding climate in a metaphorical sense.
It’s no accident the scenes in the US are filmed in warmer hues. An overarching theme of the film is a contrast between the authoritarianism of Communist China under Mao and the freedom of everyday life in the democratic west.
