At 27, Bi Gan Got Famous for Kaili Blues. Most Young Directors Are Still Struggling on the Road

Film is a fairly mercenary business. Even once you have proved you are good enough, the hard part may be just beginning.

The first time Bi Gan, a director born in 1989, watched his film Kaili Blues screened in public was in 2015, in a large square in Locarno, a small town in southern Switzerland. About 3,000 people were there. It was called a public screening, but there wasn't even a proper cinema involved.

Switzerland has held the Locarno International Film Festival every summer since 1946. It is barely known in China and has no red carpet. But set beside Cannes, Berlin and Venice, it wins on atmosphere. With the glamour stripped away, Locarno has an unusual appetite for art films and new work — so much so that when Bi Gan looked back on it, the word he used was "intoxicated."

In an interview with Southern Weekly, Bi Gan said he played roulette for a while every day in Locarno. On the one day he lost, he won Best Emerging Director in the Filmmakers of the Present competition. The detail sounds breezy, but in the days before the crew left for Locarno the whole production was still in chaos. The post-production details, the DCP (the digital print file) and clearance from the broadcasting regulator were all unfinished. July 31 was the deadline to submit the DCP, but a technical fault left one shot pixelated, and they had to email and beg for three more days. Since it was the premiere, everyone on the crew wanted to go, but they couldn't scrape together the airfare, and in the end got Swiss International Air Lines to sponsor them.

When Locarno's invitation came, Bi Gan in fact had other options: Venice's two non-competition sections, Venice Days and Orizzonti, and South Korea's Busan International Film Festival. His choice turned out to be the right one. Busan has limited reach in the West, and Venice, for all its prestige, keeps its non-competition sections at the margins.

After the Locarno premiere, foreign critics and distributors all came looking for Bi Gan, and the head of the film festival in Nantes, France, sent an invitation too. The biggest "surprise" arrived after his flight home landed: calls and texts poured in, and he found his "phone was about to explode."

Through the second half of 2015, Bi Gan took the film to more than 20 international festivals, won seven prizes, and screened it many times over.

He was famous.

Shen Yang, deputy general manager of China Film International, thinks that marketing and distribution plan was exactly right. She is one of the people who handled festivals and overseas distribution for Bi Gan. "Every film has different conditions and different opportunities, and festivals serve different functions. For films of different scale, we make judgments about which festivals to choose."

Shen ran the project market at the Shanghai International Film Festival for years, matching filmmakers with investors. At the end of 2013 she joined China Film International to work on overseas distribution and co-productions. Her best-known collaborator is Diao Yinan and his Black Coal, Thin Ice; others include Li Xiaofeng of Nezha, Zhang Ming of Through the Night (《穿过黑夜》), Zhang Bingjian of North by Northeast, and now Bi Gan of Kaili Blues.

"Black Coal, Thin Ice was already a mature work, so we sent it straight to Berlin. Films by new directors, like Kaili Blues and Nezha, are better suited to platforms with prizes meant to encourage newcomers," Shen told QDaily.

Winning honors at international festivals in order to draw attention at home has become the common route for China's young "art house" directors. Even in Hollywood, in fact, playing niche festivals is the most common way independent films survive; that is how they recoup their production costs. The logic is nothing like that of commercial films, whose money comes through theatrical release.

Kaili Blues tells a story set in the rural town of Kaili, in Guizhou province: the poet Chen Sheng sets out to carry out his mother's dying wish and find the child his brother abandoned. Dialect, poetic voiceover and an unrestrained 40-minute long take are among its marks. Nobody paid it any attention at first, but the art prizes made its name.

What made him and Kaili Blues known to ordinary audiences at home, though, was Best New Director at the Golden Horse Awards in November 2015. He walked the red carpet, took the prize, gave a speech, and ran into Hou Hsiao-hsien backstage. "He said a few simple words to me — take filmmaking seriously," Bi Gan said. It was the only moment in the interview when he sounded excited.

The rest of the time he was calm. Shen Yang rates his communication skills highly: he is an unusually natural, easy person, and comfortable in front of the media.

Except in translation. Bi Gan's calm has caused him some trouble: "I'm telling a joke, and they think I'm being serious."

The bustle of the festivals bears no resemblance to where Bi Gan was two years earlier, making the film on his own.

In China, a young person who wants to make films, and is able to, has roughly these routes.

The Shanghai Film Festival's project market and its Young Film Project are among the more established ones. Every year they open applications nationwide; a selection committee picks about 30 projects, which then get to pitch film companies for money and resources. The industry also has companies and organizations that invest specifically in young directors and art films. Fang Li and his company Laurel Films are the best-known example — Li Yu, Lou Ye and Wang Chao all got their first round of money from Fang Li. Some directors have gone straight into Cannes on the strength of a short film and won the backing of foreign producers and funds.

Li Zhaoyu, an independent film festival curator born in 1986, thinks the assorted director-training programs are the least reliable route of all. "Li Yapeng's Coart director training brought in a Taiwanese director. You'd think it was a conversation with the audience; really they were charging money to run a course." Li Zhaoyu was also one of the people promoting Kaili Blues.

More young directors, first-timers above all, hit walls everywhere and end up scraping their own money together to shoot the film first, then taking it out to sell. Once a film company sees its worth, it will put up money for the rest of the work — post-production, marketing, distribution, all the way to release. That last route is the one Bi Gan took.

At the end of 2013, Bi Gan decided the Kaili Blues script he had spent three years writing — it was still called The Book of Disquiet then — was ready. He had been turned down many times, but he also felt he "couldn't wait any longer." The 200,000 yuan that finally got the camera rolling came entirely from relatives and friends: Ding Jianguo, a teacher at Bi Gan's alma mater, the Communication University of Shanxi, put in more than 100,000 yuan; his mother put in 20,000; his wife, then his girlfriend, put in some too. Ding Jianguo also helped borrow a professional camera from the school.

The shoot itself fell apart for a time. The schedule dragged, and over half of the more than 20 crew members left within a month, leaving four people including Bi Gan. He shot the film himself; the sound recordist was Liang Kai, a partner from his earlier wedding-video business; the lead was his own uncle, unpaid.

Plenty of others have been through the same thing. Li Ruijun, director of River Road, paid for his first feature, Summer Solstice, almost entirely himself — the whole family pitched in, and his cousin served as producer. When Xin Yukun made his debut, The Coffin in the Mountain, the crew nearly broke up; the 1.7 million yuan came from a friend in business.

Shan Zuolong, general manager of Tianhua Huatian and now the producer of Kaili Blues, saw the film in May 2015, decided to come in, and signed Bi Gan. Tianhua Huatian exists to support art-house directors; its founder made his money in real estate and funds the company out of it. It has signed young directors including Hao Jie, Li Ruijun, Yang Jin, Peng Tao and Pema Tseden, pays each 3,000 yuan a month, and covers part of the cost of their films. The company's own structure is very simple. Shan Zuolong is the general manager, but he is really more of a "buyer," scouting people worth investing in, while someone else on the team controls the risk.

Shan Zuolong says young directors can hardly dodge the difficulty of starting out. "The first work is extremely hard. A new director has no track record and no past work, so there's no way to prove your talent quickly — it's a paradox. Bi Gan was the same: with the first film, no money means no shoot, and no shoot means no proof. The first one you have to manage on your own."

As the film market has grown hotter, more and more people have said they want to do something for young filmmakers. Most of it has been all thunder and no rain.

Youku Tudou, Tencent Video and iQiyi have each launched a young-director support program that pays for a short film — but these look more like ways to stockpile talent for making web movies.

Alibaba Pictures launched its Plan A last October, saying it would put 1 billion yuan behind young directors. Its CEO, Zhang Qiang, also said the 1 billion yuan was only a pool of money, with no detailed plan or arrangements yet.

Enlight Media takes pride in how hard it backs new directors: of the more than 30 films it plans to shoot this year, a third are to be directorial debuts. But the "new directors" are mostly actors trying to move into directing.

Then there are the official programs. In 2007 and again in 2015, the broadcasting regulator rolled out two different schemes to support young directors. No mature work has come out of either.

In fact, over the past few years the young directors' films that have made it onto the big screen have come by one of two routes. Either they got money and marketing support through the Shanghai festival's project market, as The Piano in a Factory and Nezha did, or, like Kaili Blues and The Coffin in the Mountain, the director paid to shoot the film first and then took the rough cut around to companies willing to market and distribute it.

Shen Yang thinks this fits the reality. "The market itself is growing explosively and there's a lot of demand for new directors, but because the market is now so large, investors are getting more cautious. In any market, only 10% or 20% of films make money. Market-driven investment is leaving new directors fewer opportunities, not more."

Set against other countries, the position of new Chinese directors is neither clearly better nor clearly worse, since every film market differs and faces different problems. Li Zhaoyu and Shan Zuolong both think art films have it better abroad. Li's reasoning is that other countries have art-house cinema circuits and several distribution channels, Blu-ray and DVD among them, and audiences there want independent film. Shan thinks official support is stronger elsewhere: Taiwan has government subsidy funds and Europe has film funds, and directors can apply to both.

But Shen Yang is not optimistic about newcomers' chances abroad either. "Domestic films are only 1% to 2% of the market in Canada. The situation there is harsher, and even less is left for them."

Bi Gan is more detached about all this. Young directors abroad, he told QDaily, are in a more "classical" state — they simply make films — while many directors in China are running across "scorching ground."

Bi Gan did his own "running" for a while. After Kaili Blues wrapped, he moved to Beijing with the film to look for opportunities. Dealing with film companies and capital was, for him, a lesson. He has said in interviews that once past the creative part, filmmaking has nothing to do with him, yet he also admits: "Through this film I understand more about the problems in distribution, the hard parts, and where there's room to break through. That's how I'll go from naive to professional, bit by bit."

All of it is how a director learns to deal with the industry. Diao Yinan and Black Coal, Thin Ice started out worried about running into unreliable companies at home, and hoped to find investment at overseas festivals instead. That coincided with the European financial crisis, and after the rounds at Busan and Rotterdam he still had no money. So he came back and learned to deal with Chinese capital, finally settling on Happy Blue Ocean as the film's producer.

Shen Yang thinks "it matters enormously what kind of operator you pair a new director with." "Plenty of films make no impression at all. The quality itself isn't good enough, and there are serious problems in how resources are allocated, including the core creative team and the marketing team. You can count China's mature creative teams on two hands."

Bi Gan is now optimistic in a way he never was before. With a stable team around him, he thinks the advantages of "hot money" can show themselves fully. "Raising 10 million yuan for my next film, for instance, is now very easy. With a producer and an executive producer handling that side, the money can go into making the film I want to make. That's the good thing a red-hot market brings."

Faced with capital, Bi Gan insists he can stay entirely independent. "Even one yuan of capital comes with demands, but whether you answer those demands, and how, is up to you. You give me one yuan and ask me to go and keep you company for an hour — how could I? You give me a million yuan and ask me to keep you company for one minute — I couldn't do that either."

How it will actually turn out may be beyond anything Bi Gan can predict now. Fang Li, after seeing Li Ruijun's earlier work, was willing to put money into River Road. He later admitted to one "bad idea": he wanted to add historical flashbacks to the film, shots of massed armies, or a fugitive character — something that could take a star and stage big scenes. Li Ruijun thought it would jar, and turned him down.

After Xin Yukun's The Coffin in the Mountain screened at the FIRST Film Festival, a number of film and TV companies came to him with ready-made IP, including grand fantasy projects. His new film, the low-to-mid-budget rural mystery Mountain Pursuit (《山野追踪》), still has no big company interested.

In commercial genre film, Ning Hao is the biggest leap and the best outcome. Born in 1977, Ning Hao was also scraping money together for independent films in the early 2000s. In 2006, backed by Andy Lau's Focus: First Cuts scheme, he made Crazy Stone, and from there grew step by step into one of the directors with the strongest pull at the box office, eventually founding his own film company.

"There are plenty of bad art films, and there are high-quality commercial films. As long as the quality is good enough, it will break through." That is a view Shen Yang and Bi Gan share.

Still, directors stamped with the "art house" label probably have a harder road. On one side it is hard to move into commercial film; on the other there is the cold reception in distribution.

In early 2016, Taihe Entertainment took on distribution for Kaili Blues. Shan Zuolong called them "brave" — even with that many prizes as a guarantee, many large distributors would not carry the risk.

The day before he was interviewed by QDaily, Bi Gan was still up at five in the morning writing publicity copy for the film. The piece later ran on the film account Taotao Film, and included this passage: "Before I made this film I never thought it would be released on the mainland; I thought that would be a waste of time. What finally made me willing to wade into these muddy waters was my producing partner, Zuolong. He believes in a line from Ogawa Shinsuke: 'Audiences are never fools, for the simple reason that everyone is fighting to stay alive.'"

By "a waste of time" he meant that for all the groundwork laid for the release of Kaili Blues, the result still wouldn't be good. An art film with hardly any stars and an "odd" style is at odds with what cinemas are commercially for — even Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin was a precedent for praise without ticket sales.

Before it opened on July 15, Kaili Blues also changed its release date. It had been set for June 3, which put it up against X-Men: Apocalypse and Warcraft. Bi Gan, Shen Yang and Shan Zuolong did not think moving was a good idea at first; they felt it would make them look "precious and affected." The real reason may be that they believed moving or not would make little difference to the outcome.

In the end it made none. Over its first three-day weekend, Kaili Blues never got more than 1% of showtimes. Mainstream chains rarely scheduled it, and even cinemas willing to show it mostly put it on at ten in the morning or ten at night. However good its reviews, for most people the film might as well never have existed.

Images: film stills and promotional photos of the director.