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A Gentle Night – 5 Questions for Film Director Qiu Yang

Trysten Cain·
Film Interviews

Won the Palme d'Or - Best Short Film at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, among other awards.

palme d'or short filmwinner
1. Who or what motivated you to pursue filmmaking?
I think art practicing is a way for me to solve my own personal problems as well as trying to understand the world around me. It's almost a process of meditation or free therapy session. And filmmaking is just happened to be the art medium that I choose to practice.
 
 
2. How does your film primarily differentiate or distinguish itself from other work?
I'm not sure if I could answer this question myself. I think my work is a specific combination of who I am, what I know and the experience I have as an individual human being. Which should be both specific for me, and also common for everyone else. I think my very own cultural background, my upbringing made me a very specific person and this might differentiate the work I create for everyone else.
 
 
3. What's some of the best advice you've received?
Never assume anything and always overprepare everything.
 

4. What are you hoping audiences take away from this film?
I never really thought about this. But I guess I might hope the audiences to start to care about what happened in the film, those things are all real stories that happened in real life around me, and more importantly, why would these stories happen.
 
 
5. Why does telling this story through film, versus any other medium, matter to you?
I think every film has a very specific element to it, time. I think what the character experienced is something can only be experienced over a period of time, over a serious of encounters, and together, that would create the complicated emotion and situation that she is in. And I think only over time, especially after the ending, the audience can experience the exact same feeling that the main character is in. That's probably why a film is a more suitable medium for this story.