This young man made a mystery film, and its release may already be the best chance this environment can give him

How did a man who was shooting promotional videos for the Mianyang Museum a few years ago get this far?

Li Yuhe thinks of himself as a lucky director.

On May 12, his first feature, Absurd Accident, opened in theaters. "No. 3 Wenhuiyuan Road," the WeChat official account of the China Film Archive in Beijing, called it a film with "nothing to be on edge about": critics liked it, it was made on a small budget, and it had a big name watching over it. That big name is the Hong Kong director Derek Yee, who served as the film's producer.

At the Beijing International Film Festival, which wrapped up not long ago, more people saw the trailer for Absurd Accident than saw either Michelangelo Antonioni's or Hirokazu Kore-eda's films — almost every screening opened with a run of it.

Before Absurd Accident, Li Yuhe, who turns 36 this year, had done nearly every job on the film production line. He studied film acting first, then directing, and after graduating he worked as a visual-effects director at Crystal CG, a "visual technology application service company." Planning, screenwriting, visual effects, editing — he tried everything a film touches. As a director, he shot commercials and promotional videos, including a three-act film for the Mianyang History Museum.

In March 2011, he and a few friends shot his first narrative work as a director, Three Kilometers. The 27-minute short tells the story of a man who kills his girlfriend by accident and spends the night hiding the body. Shooting that dark story took Li Yuhe four nights and a budget of 20,000 yuan.

It also brought him his first piece of luck as a director. In 2011, Three Kilometers won Best Director and Best Cinematography in the Young Filmmakers Competition at the 5th FIRST Youth Film Festival in Xining.

That year, the FIRST Youth Film Festival, only five years old, had just moved to Xining. The festival — later known for films like The Coffin in the Mountain and The Summer Is Gone, and devoted to "continually discovering and championing the first and early works of young filmmakers" — was still a small, even amateurish affair. To this day, the account of Three Kilometers in Li Yuhe's profile on the festival's website is fairly inaccurate.

But it was enough.

"Director" Li Yuhe had finally found a corner of the film world to call his own. Three Kilometers picked up a few more awards, and he started writing his own feature, the film that became Absurd Accident. The story still involved hiding a body, with more black comedy added: around a case of a man hiring a killer to murder his wife, several groups of characters play out a three-act farce.

Writing the script took two years. Then came the long search for money, from one film company to the next, until Heyi Pictures agreed to put up 2 million yuan and let Li Yuhe shoot it. Heyi Pictures itself was less than a year old at the time.

In the winter of 2015, Li Yuhe took his crew to Huairou. There they spent 24 days shooting the film. There were corpses again, and long stretches of night shoots, and the whole crew wore itself out. But past the physical toll, the biggest problem on set, as Li Yuhe saw it, was still the lack of money.

To save money, they gave up on some of the sets, including the film's main location, the Xiankelai Inn. With no budget to build it, they found an old factory building that had belonged to the sunflower-seed brand Qiaqia, knocked down two walls, and gave it a fresh coat of paint.

The other way to save money was to call in favors. Li Yuhe told QDaily that the actors were all paid "very little" and were essentially doing him a favor. Some were stage actors Ren Suxi brought in. "They're all actors who know how to act," Li Yuhe said.

Getting Ren Suxi was itself a piece of luck. A friend of Li Yuhe's for years, she agreed to join Absurd Accident as soon as the script was done. She had just finished shooting Mr. Donkey, which was still being edited. When Mr. Donkey came out, it turned Ren Suxi into the film's other selling point, alongside Derek Yee.

Even so, by the end of the 24-day shoot, with editing and post-production ahead, the crew had almost no money left. Li Yuhe rushed through both and sent the film to the Shanghai International Film Festival.

That is where this film, which "was never meant for theaters" to begin with, ran into its biggest break.

In June 2016, Absurd Accident was shortlisted for Best Film in the Asian New Talent competition. The jury president that year was Derek Yee.

After watching it, Derek Yee had two main things to say: the music in the film hadn't been cleared for rights, and the film should go into theaters. In an interview with Derek Yee by the WeChat official account "Drinking in Broad Daylight," he said: "I met the head of the company he [Li Yuhe] was with, and when the film came up, I said I'd be willing to produce it. Young directors on the mainland all hit the same problem: by post-production they're running around on their own. In Hong Kong there's always a coordinator in post who handles everything for you."

That is how Derek Yee came to Absurd Accident. Li Yuhe said that even "a person as calm as I usually am felt a bit flattered."

Derek Yee joined as producer only after the film was basically finished, but what he did for it was enormous.

First, he put Li Yuhe in touch with the Hong Kong composer Peter Kam, who wrote the film's score in post, replacing the uncleared music Li Yuhe had used in the rough cut. Peter Kam has won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Original Film Score eight times, for films including Fly Me to Polaris, Lost in Time, and Perhaps Love. The film's texture changed as a result, even if the style stayed the one Li Yuhe had imagined.

Next, Derek Yee found the film some follow-up money. Not much, but enough for another round of editing. He took it seriously — "every time he watched a cut he'd take notes in a little notebook and give feedback right away" — and the recut, after a few shots came out, moved better.

Derek Yee's bigger power showed in the publicity campaign. As those lines about "a big name watching over it" at the top of this piece suggest, his name as producer has become one of the film's selling points.

Established directors signing on as producers is a common way of supporting newer ones. The most famous case is Jia Zhangke, who has been backing young directors' films in various forms since 2006. His Wings Program, which mainly takes the form of "serving as producer on new films by young directors," has put out seven films so far, among them Han Jie's debut Mr. Tree, which won the Jury Grand Prize at the 14th Shanghai International Film Festival.

Derek Yee has produced more than 20 films since 1997, including theatrical hits like Overheard. Last year he also produced Wang Xuebo's debut Knife in the Clear Water, which, like many of the films Jia Zhangke has produced, won plenty of awards at home and abroad but never reached theaters.

"Judging is boring work, but I enjoyed watching this one." That was Derek Yee's reaction when he first saw the film at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and that reaction is exactly the capital that bought Absurd Accident its luck.

Li Yuhe meant it that way. At test screenings of Absurd Accident, plenty of viewers thought of The Coffin in the Mountain, another FIRST prizewinner. At first glance the two do look alike: both play with structure, both use multi-strand narratives, both have mystery elements, both are set in the countryside. But the differences are real, if subtle. Audiences come out of Absurd Accident in a noticeably lighter mood.

"I never wanted to make it a heavy story. If you expose too much of the frightening side of human nature, the film does get more profound, but I'd rather stop short. Some people do think the film I ended up with doesn't dig deep enough, that it leaves you unsatisfied. But I think making people laugh matters most," Li Yuhe told QDaily.

He never wanted to be a "purely art-house director." Though he brought up Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino repeatedly in interviews, he still sees a film as a product in a market: "It has to face an audience, get talked about, and it needs box office."

Xin Yukun, who directed The Coffin in the Mountain, took the other road. After making his name at FIRST, he turned down a pile of ready-made IP projects and began preparing another low-budget rural mystery, Mountain Chase (《山野追踪》). But like The Coffin in the Mountain, that film has yet to interest a big company.

This is the problem that many "young director support programs" share. Film festivals, the FIRST Youth Film Festival in Xining among them, select a large batch of well-reviewed films every year. But most of those films lean toward personal expression, which makes them hard to sell tickets with, and even a theatrical release is no guarantee of success. The Summer Is Gone, a winner at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards, got a 3.18% share of screenings on its opening day on the mainland and finished with 4.346 million yuan in total box office.

So the share of purely art-house projects getting support at festival financing forums and young-director programs has dropped sharply. At the project financing forum of the 7th Beijing International Film Festival, genre films — "mystery, thriller, crime" — made up more than half the shortlisted projects, and every project that took a major prize belonged to that group.

Seen that way, comparing Absurd Accident to Ning Hao's debut Crazy Stone counts as a compliment. That film was both well reviewed and a huge commercial success. And Li Yuhe admits that at this stage he does prefer Ning Hao's work.

But being a "less personal" director brings its own troubles. "You have to think about censorship, money, and how to fit what you want to shoot to the market," Li Yuhe told QDaily. Through writing and shooting, a director keeps absolute control of the film; by editing, post-production, and marketing, as more and more people come in, there is more and more to give up.

Marketing, for instance. Because the story of Absurd Accident has a strand about erectile dysfunction, that piece got pulled out on its own during the campaign, and the distributor used it for a set of so-called "dirty posters," with taglines as suggestive as "click-click-click, bang-bang-bang." Li Yuhe's reaction, as the director, was that he "hadn't expected it."

Then there was the release date. The film was originally set for April, but during the campaign, in order to "let word of mouth ferment a little longer," the crew spent a good deal of time on a national roadshow. It worked reasonably well: on the eve of the official release, the film's Douban rating was 7.4.

This is already the best chance a new director can get.

After all, the man who was shooting promotional videos for the Mianyang History Museum a few years ago is now a director with a feature in theaters. And what excites him most in all this is still the film itself: "It'll play in places all over the world, and people will talk about it. And you and your friends left a stretch of happy time behind in a little black box."

If you've already seen Absurd Accident, you may want to know more about the details in it.

Q: QDaily

L: Li Yuhe

Q: What was your original intention in making this film?

L: It started as satire aimed at a certain kind of con artist in society. I had feelings about some social phenomena at the time, and decided to write a script. But I didn't want the film to be nothing more than a few short pieces stuck together — I wanted the characters' stories tied together more tightly, so I added the structure it has now. It shows what happens to each group of characters separately while weaving their stories into one another, which makes the film more watchable. I think it also touches our theme: we read the world wrong and then blame it for deceiving us.

Q: Why put in the three "silent film" passages?

L: They weren't in the script, actually. We shot all the coverage we needed the normal way, and I only tried this out in editing. I thought of the whole thing as an absurdist mystery, and this kind of form could create a contrast. The first passage has two actors chasing each other from upstairs to down, right where the story's mood turns from suspense to comedy — the plot reversal was reinforced by the editing. So I tried echoing it in other passages, looking for places with that contrast and places where the atmosphere was tenser, and putting a reversal there too.

Q: But if you use that form too much, doesn't it risk "form outweighing content"?

L: Form serves content, of course. The way I see it, every film has a "seed." The seed is what the story grows out of, but the seed has to serve the story, not the other way around.

When I was writing, my seed was satirizing a certain kind of con artist — fooling yourself, and being fooled by others. So the characters, out of control, do some absurd things. But once the seed has done its work, there's no need to keep reinforcing it or flaunting it through the story. Form is the same. Like the seed, it serves the story itself. A film has to be watchable first.

Q: How would you define this film?

L: A relatively realistic story with a satirical, absurdist edge, a black comedy — a composite story.

Cover image from: the film's poster.