A still from the movie 

Knife in the Clear Water, a movie that revolves around a man's struggle to keep his beloved bull from being sacrificed for his dead wife's funeral rites, won the New Currents Award at the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), which took place in South Korea in October.

As one of Asia's most significant film festivals, BIFF focuses on introducing and supporting new Asian directors and their works.

The film, which marks Wang Xuebo's directorial debut, was adapted from a namesake novella that won the Lu Xun Literary Prize, the highest literary award in China, in 2001.

Following his wife's death, the main character is advised by his son to sacrifice the family's bull to feed the guests attending the traditional purification ceremony to mark the 40th day since the wife's passing. Although the protagonist is reluctant to kill the bull, which has labored for him all its life, he has no other option given the family's limited resources. The bull sees the knife that will be used to slaughter it and refuses to eat or drink in the three days leading up to its sacrifice.

An artistic experiment

The novella's author, Shi Shuqing, a member of China's Hui ethnic minority, said faithfully adapting the story to a film was not a simple undertaking. Although many directors had proposed the idea over the past decade or so, he had refused to give away the copyright until he saw Wang's script.

According to Wang, making a story of merely 6,000 or so Chinese characters into a film was challenging, especially since 80 percent of the novella consisted of descriptions of the lead character's state of mind. "The protagonist is not good at talking ... I had to represent his thought patterns through his relationships with the surroundings and his interactions with the bull and other people. Initially I tried to represent his psychology through monologue but found this way of presentation to be awkward," said Wang, adding that the plots in the original were very simple. "It's a story where you can predict the end when you see the beginning," he said.

Although the film is set in a poverty-stricken village in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Wang said he didn't intend the film's focus to be on rural areas or ethnic minorities. He just wanted to experiment with a new art form.

Wang employed ordinary people as actors and actresses in his film. "Although they are not professional, they understand local people's lives," said Wang. Another unusual aspect of the film is its lack of musical score. Wang said that while music serves to strengthen emotions, the film portrays feelings strongly enough, and natural sounds—of wind, water and barking dogs, for example—provide a kind of background music and assist the development of the plot.

Movie producer and director Wang Xuebo

Failed attempt

Wang's classmate Shi Yanwei, who belongs to the Hui ethnic minority, recommended the novella to Wang when he was studying at the Northeast Normal University in Changchun, Jilin Province, in 2007. Wang, who had developed an interest in the customs and religions of northwest China from an early age, fell for the story immediately. Having decided to make it into a short film, the pair recruited a production team online. The finished work, less than 30 minutes in duration, was included in an exhibition of students' works at the Beijing Film Academy. Wang, however, felt such a short film was inadequate to present the novella, and he wanted to make the story into a feature film.

In 2010, Wang spent nearly 10 months living in the village to experience local people's lives and collect material for the full-length version. He incorporated details of daily village life he witnessed into the work, such as scenes where villagers borrow money. "I don't want to move the audience by the villagers' poverty, but to authentically represent their lives," said Wang.

His first production attempt, however, came to naught. The lead actor, whom Wang had spent half a year finding, turned out to be camera-shy. And local customs, which required actors and actresses playing couples in the film to be actual couples, added to the difficulties.

"It was like falling off a cliff. I felt on top of the world after securing a big investment for the film. But the failure of the filming plan cast me into hell immediately," Wang told Beijing Review.

After suspending the project, Wang returned to Changchun and caught up on reading—mostly literature by Soviet and Latin American writers. Before long, though, he realized that he really wanted to do something related to films, so he turned his hand to film production.

Success at last

Prior to his directorial debut, Wang produced mostly art films such as Tharlo, a Tibetan-language film, and The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping, which reflects life in less developed rural parts of northeast China. Wang said that while he enjoyed watching South Korean TV dramas and Hollywood blockbusters at university, he prefers films that offer something unique and doesn't want his productions to be overly commercial.

As a producer, Wang has achieved notable success; The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping won the Best Short Film Award at the 51st Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival in 2014, and Tharlo was nominated for the Venice Horizons Award at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival in 2015. But Wang never gave up his long-cherished dream of becoming a director.

Returning to the village in Ningxia in 2015, he found it had become more open and the villagers had fewer reservations about filming compared with five years earlier. At long last, Wang was able to realize his ambition to transform Shi's novella into a film.

Having now embarked on his directorial career, Wang, who is in his early 30s, said he feels lucky and attributes his achievements so far to the overall development of China's film industry. Compared with older directors, those of Wang's generation benefit from a higher starting point; they not only have greater access to the works of foreign filmmakers, but can also enjoy the positive changes brought to the industry by digital technology.

As for what matters when portraying China to international audiences through film, Wang said Westerners' curiosity about China is strong, and they want to see something unique.

Copyedited by Chris Surtees

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