Screenwriter: Zheng Yi
Cinematographer: Chen Wancai, Zhang Yimou
Production Designer: Yang Gang
Composer: Xu Youfu
Cast: Zhang Yimou, Lv Liping, Liang Yujin, Xie Yan, Niu Xingli
HDCam, color, in Mandarin w/ English s/t, 130 min.
In China’s mountainous interior region a village struggles to find and maintain a water supply long after nearby settlements have given up. Digging wells in the rugged terrain and clashes with another equally stubborn town make it a dangerous, sometimes deadly endeavor, one that has become a collective obsession of the villagers fiercely defensive of their way of life. Shooting against stunning mountain backdrops, Wu brings an almost ethnographic attention to rural traditions that the villagers struggle to maintain – in defiance of the modernization that might prove their salvation.
Woven into the quest for water are the romantic entanglements of a prominent well-digger played by Zhang Yimou, soon to be internationally acclaimed for his directorial debut, Red Sorghum (1987). Zhang was working as the film’s director of photography when Wu Tianming asked him to double as the film’s leading man, Wangquan, an engineer returned to his hometown with new techniques for finding water. A symbol and product of an emerging, modern China, Wangquan nevertheless finds himself trapped by custom and his domineering father in an arranged marriage with a local widow, and forced to deny his love for Qiaoying (Liang Yujin), also newly returned from college. The social and political currents shaping contemporary China at the time course through The Old Well like the winds and water that shape the cliffs that rise above the village on all sides, as Wu sheers away melodrama with a finely honed documentary edge. – Paul Malcolm
In person: Janet Wu Yanyan (daughter of the late Wu Tianming)
Robert Rosen (Dean Emeritus, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television)
Wu Tianming was born in Shaanxi Province in 1939 and graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in the 1970s before being named head of the X’ian Film Studio. Wu transformed the backwater studio into a hotbed of new, creative energy. While directing a series of groundbreaking films himself, including River Without Buoys (1983), Life (1984) and The Old Well (1986), Wu is also acknowledged as the “Godfather of the Fifth Generation” for his mentorship and early support of the group of internationally acclaimed filmmakers that includes Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Huang Jianxin. Wu lived in exile in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, but returned to China to direct the award-winning The King of Masks (1996). He remained active as a director and actor, completing his final film Song of the Phoenix (2013) shortly before passing away in March 2014.