Das Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Barbara Wurm (BW): Congratulations on your first feature film! Your film embraces a lot of elements. How long did you work on it?
Xinyang Zhang (XZ): I began writing the very first word of the script when I was 23 years old. I completed the film when I was 27, and this year I have just turned 30. So altogether, I worked on this film for eight years. The actual shooting took 35 days. The day of the Berlinale premiere coincides precisely with the date twelve days before I wrapped up shooting in 2022.
BW: What is your professional background? Have you studied film? What has shaped your relationship with cinema?
XZ: I studied film and graduated from university, majoring in directing. The source of my engagement with film really came from literature. In fact, before I studied film, I always wanted to become a literary writer. I grew up in Jiangsu Province, in the city of Changzhou, and in a city like that, traditional education is extremely brutal. My academic performance was actuallly very poor because I could not fit into an educational system focused around tests. With my grades, I may not have been able to get into a strong university to study literature. Art, however, is something very close to literature, and it was very helpful for me in getting into university. I felt it was almost equivalent to literature, so I chose something I genuinely liked to do. Compared with literature, I felt it had greater inclusiveness and was also more interesting.
Yun-hua Chen (YC): You mention that art is a broader discipline than literature, and we see aspects of art ranging from classical Chinese literature, poetry, to painting and music in your film. Can you talk about your approach to these different aspects of art?
XZ: First, let me talk about the poetry that appears in the film. All of the poems that appear in the film come from a poet of the Southern Song Dynasty, nearly a thousand years ago, named Xin Qiji. All of the poems are his, because I am particularly fond of this poet. When he wrote poetry, he especially liked to use classical references. It is a way of conversing with the ancients. In fact, it is a very evocative, almost soul-summoning method. It draws the ancients into one’s own world to have a conversation with them. So, as the characters in the film gather together in that ruin, and accompanied by Xin Qiji’s poetry, they are carrying out a very grand ritual of summoning. They draw their own pasts, memories, and pain into that space. They converse with their past selves, with themselves as they once were; they speak with their lost friends, relatives, and vanished figures. They talk, they engage in dialogue. All the poetry in the film functions like a key. It opens the door to all memories. Regarding the painterly and musical elements - film, after all, is something that can contain many things. It is a more modern art form. And I was trying to find a way to bring painting and music together. I was looking for a catalyst. My catalyst was basically alcohol. After drinking, I very easily found a way to arrange them. There are new elements and some old elements, and they combine with each other. These combinations produce a kind of strange, absurd, or unusual sense of beauty. And this kind of beauty is actually a way to prevent the characters in my film from being alienated. It is a form of beauty used to resist the alienation they experience from society.
YC: Your original Chinese title is ‘Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases’, the title of a Han Dynasty medical text, whereas your English title is PANDA, referring to the panda that is the reincarnation of a character’s friend. Can you please talk about these two titles?
XZ: My Chinese title and my English title – one is gentle, PANDA, whereas the other one, ‘Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases’, is cruel. Let me first explain why it is called PANDA. I think this is a film that, in its form, very much resembles a giant panda. Giant pandas are black and white, and the colors of this film are also black and white. But you will also discover that within this black-and-white world, patches of color occasionally appear. Those colored parts are like the tongue of a panda when it sticks it out – its tongue is pink. Second, I think I filmed a group of people who are as lovely and precious as pandas. These people are clumsy, they are lovable, and they are also about to gradually disappear from this land of ours, to be erased and forgotten, becoming something extinct and ancient. So, I hope that when audiences see these people, they look at them the way they look at pandas: gazing at them for a long time, experiencing their fragility, and feeling their tenderness. This is why it is called PANDA.
I hope that when audiences see these people, they look at them the way they look at pandas: gazing at them for a long time, experiencing their fragility, and feeling their tenderness.
As for the Chinese title, ‘Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases’- the four characters in Chinese meaning ‘cold damage’ and ‘miscellaneous diseases’ already make it very clear. It is a collective portrait, a story of many people. It contains everyone’s pain in life, illness, inner melancholy, the things that cannot be forgotten, those accumulated emotions buried in the heart, the feelings that cannot be relieved. What remains, of course, is something about a larger environment. Around 2018, a lot of people close to me in my family were falling ill, one after another. When I was keeping them company in the hospital, I constantly witnessed birth, aging, sickness, and death every day. My eldest uncle, for example, had stomach cancer, and two-thirds of his stomach was removed. The doctor held the removed stomach in front of me and said, ‘Look, this thing has already been cut out.’ And then I began to think. I first thought about my own pain, the pain of the people around me, and then I began to imagine that perhaps in this world, there are many people who, like me and my family, are also enduring life, enduring pain. I wanted to know what it is that we are, ultimately, enduring.
BW: How did you develop your characters? Are they based on specific role models?
XZ: Xing Qiji, the doctor, resembles a summoner of souls. The young woman is a mythic figure, a being filled with spirituality, almost like a bodhisattva. Wang Laodao, the cook who cuts his own finger, resembles a suffering ordinary man. And the homeless man is like a fanatical shaman — a scientist and a dreamer. They all move through this human world together: they encounter one another. Their social classes and their ways of thinking all seem quite different, but when they are together, these people attain a kind of equality.
YC: There are a lot of documentary-like moments in your fiction film. Are there real people who inspired you to write about these characters? And, why did you choose Nanjing and why these ruined buildings along the river in Nanjing specifically?
XZ: I believe that the ultimate destination of a city is ruin – that’s my understanding of space. Ruins offer us an infinite sense of temporality – a limitless elasticity of time. Human life is exceedingly brief, yet the temporality that ruins provide is extraordinarily vast. When we place our fleeting lives within ruins, which possess an infinite sense of time, our memories surge forth. We find, within the ruins, a certain redemption for our past selves. I think we need a certain kind of brokenness – brokenness akin to ruins – to achieve a deeper and more distant understanding of the world.
I think we need a certain kind of brokenness – brokenness akin to ruins – to achieve a deeper and more distant understanding of the world.
Choosing the city of Nanjing is more about my understanding of time. Nanjing is a city on the banks of the Yangtze River, and the river itself resembles a vast storage device. The Yangtze flows continuously every day, so it has witnessed so much. It flows ceaselessly, twenty-four hours a day, observing countless things unknown to others, and has borne witness to numerous deaths. Thus, it records all of this, everything related to death and memory. I attempt to have my characters walk along the riverbank, to retrieve their pasts from the river’s water. In doing so, they themselves become part of the Yangtze’s temporal material. As for Nanjing, it has been the capital of relatively short-lived dynasties. Its Six Dynasties period, with all its opulence, shone brightly but briefly before fading; every dynasty that established rule in Nanjing was extremely short-lived. Thus, the city embodies both splendor and a haunting emptiness. It particularly resembles the spaces I capture: towering skyscrapers behind, yet an entire expanse of ruins over here. To me, it is a city of contradictions, a place where creation and destruction coexist. Why does it feel like a documentary? Because the events that unfold daily are so absurd, yet so real. It seems as though no director could create a story more compelling than the events that occur in our country every single day. When you encounter these occurrences, you must record them immediately; there is no need to recreate them. Many of the scenes in the film were indeed captured spontaneously, as they happened. I must admit: perhaps the moments you find most striking are not directed by me – they are real events unfolding before us.
BW: How important is the black and white for you? What does it mean to you?
XZ: Of course, I know that the world is colorful. But what I am certain about is that what I wanted to pursue, what I wanted to obtain, was a kind of purity and freedom. Yet purity and freedom are extremely painful, and they are also extremely restrained. That is why this film is black and white. In my view, what I wanted was black and white.
Purity and freedom are extremely painful, and they are also extremely restrained. That is why this film is black and white.
And then it is also about the characters. Isn’t there a saying that the world of the rich, of those with high status and of happy people is colorful? I filmed a group of people who are poor, who have no social status, and who are unhappy. So their world, naturally, is black and white.
YC: How did you find your cast? I know that Xianmin Zhang is from Nanjing, and I noticed that a lot of your cast do not seem to have a lot of acting experience. How much of the performance was improvised, and how much came from the script? Did you draw certain traits from their real lives and incorporate them into the film?
XZ: In the film, Xianmin Zhang portrays a local Nanjing poet. Mr. Zhang is a university teacher in real life, a film executive producer, and occasionally an actor—a significant figure in China’s independent film circle and a guiding mentor in my filmmaking journey. The actor who plays the cook [Ruyin Zhang] is a retired security guard at a local police station. I discovered him completely by accident. In fact, I did not use a single scene that he shot during the first couple of days. What happened was that I booked him a room at the hotel where all cast and crew stayed, but he had never, in his entire life, slept anywhere other than his own bed at home. It was the first time that he left his home and slept at a hotel. Even though it was in the same city, perhaps only a few dozen kilometers away from home, he couldn’t sleep at all. But he is a very traditional Chinese person, so he wouldn’t tell us that he couldn’t sleep. When he arrived on set, he had forgotten all his lines. I asked him why he had forgotten all his lines three times, and he didn’t say anything. When I asked him the fourth time, he finally said, ‘Director, I haven’t slept for two days.’ So I told him to go home and sleep. Every day I sent someone to pick him up and then bring him back home. After that, he was fine, although he had never acted before.
The actor who plays the homeless man [Han Chen] is also from Nanjing. Previously, he worked as an assistant casting director for Zhang Yimou’s THE FLOWERS OF WAR (2011). He dreams of becoming an actor, so he went to Beijing to pursue that dream. After arriving in Beijing, he rarely got roles. He would post on his social media how many roles he had managed to get, maybe two or three in a year, all very minor ones. I think he is a very good and very persistent actor. Every year, I send him a message apologizing, saying that our film still hasn’t entered any film festivals yet and hasn’t been released. I truly believe that if our film could be seen, his acting would definitely be noticed, and more people would ask him to act.
As for the young woman [Jiahe Lyu], when she acted in my film, she hadn’t yet graduated from university. She was probably only twenty or twenty-one at the time and had never acted before. She liked acting, so she attended an acting training program in Beijing. When I released the casting call for this film, she saw it and signed up on her own initiative. I ultimately chose her for two reasons: first, she had never acted before; second, I felt she was a very sincere young woman. When I was casting, I said that the actor must be able to speak the local Nanjing dialect. She was the first person to say, ‘Director, I’m not from Nanjing, and I can’t speak it, but I will work hard to learn.’ These were all very sincere people, these non-professional actors, people with almost no acting experience, and I felt that they matched the temperament of my film very well. The characters in my film are not very successful people, and in life, they also seem to be people who are not very successful; I simply let them be themselves in the film.
BW: Speaking of Zhang Yimou, I was thinking a lot about Jia Zhangke when I saw this film, especially his last film CAUGHT BY THE TIDES (2024). Do you see yourself in relation to the filmmaking of Jia Zhangke, in the way that you embrace different times, spaces and biographies?
XZ: Director Jia Zhangke was the dean of my film school and is also my teacher.When I first began studying film, I was primarily influenced by Sixth Generation directors, especially directors like Jia Zhangke, as well as Chinese filmmakers working in independent cinema and independent documentary, and Japanese cinema.
As for Jia Zhangke, what influenced me most was not so much how he handles time and space, but rather how to constantly use my own eyes to look at the land we live on, to truly preserve the capacity to love, to love this land and the people who live on it, and to do everything within one’s power to capture the appearance of this land and the appearance of its people in film – before they disappear. To record them as quickly as possible in our cinema.
What influenced me most was [...] to do everything within one’s power to capture the appearance of this land and the appearance of its people in film – before they disappear.
I think CAUGHT BY THE TIDES is somewhat different from Jia Zhangke's earlier films—he has now become both a historian and a poetologist.
YC: We talked about the documentary vibes of your film, which makes it feel very real, but at the same time it is also very absurd, very magical-realistic. In the hospital scene, next to the bed, there is a robot; and at the riverbank, there is also a music-wagon where people sing with a band. Can you maybe talk about your magical realism, and the song that the vagabond sings towards the end?
XZ: The vagabond who wants to find the dragon in order to go back to the heaven is filled with immense hostility toward the world, his heart is full of profound pain. But when he is with someone he loves, he expresses that pain in the gentlest way possible - that song suddenly shifts from rock to folk. He becomes tender. Yet the meaning of the lyrics does not change – it remains his cry. He has also made a choice toward the world: standing at the cave’s mouth, looking out at the bright world, he chooses to continue into his darkness, to return to the underground space that makes him feel safe.
Regarding the robot you mentioned, I wanted to express that the ‘good life’ of our future is always a fantasy, something we fantasise. That imagined, futuristic, technology-heavy thing, to me, feels so clumsy; in the face of stronger life forces, it is merely a toy. I am very pessimistic. That is why I believe a ‘good life’ is something we create in our imagination.
I also want to talk about the hospital. That hospital is a real hospital. It was abandoned in the late 1990s. It has been deserted for over twenty years. Originally, it was part of a large cement factory in China. After it was abandoned, all its windows and doors were cemented shut. With some friends, we discovered it when exploring ruins. We knocked open a small window and entered the place together. That was the first time I felt the power of time; more accurately, I smelled the power of time. The atmosphere was from the 1990s; everything inside was completely frozen in that moment. The medicine produced in the late 1990s was still there. When I entered to shoot, I left all the trash on the floor untouched. Every breath we took was filled with the 1990s, every speck of dust we stepped on came from the 1990s.
This experience represents my encounter with the past. It was the first time I realised why I can communicate with time through ruins. When I first entered that space, I gained a very concrete sense of time and space. I decided that when I make films in the future, I must capture that feeling, that smell, and put it into my films. That is why, in the film, there is this particular treatment of space and time. I feel that I have my own way of processing and understanding these elements.
