Midi Z, the Director Who Calls Himself a Permanent Outsider: Film Matters Too Little, Life Is What Matters | Interviews

"Film only skims the surface, conveying or venting a little of what real life makes you feel. That's all it does."

Midi Z has no regrets about his new film 14 Apples, which was selected this past February for the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival. "There was no plan to begin with. It's just a self-healing traveler's record."

The 84-minute documentary happened by accident. In April 2017, having just finished an exhausting promotional run for The Road to Mandalay, Midi Z went back to his hometown in Myanmar to rest. There he heard that his friend Wang Xinghong, on a fortune-teller's advice, had taken 14 apples and gone off to the countryside to be ordained as a monk for 14 days, to cure his insomnia. Midi Z followed his newly shaven friend and recorded half a month of what he saw and heard in Aung Da village, in Myanmar's Magyi region.

In this remote tropical village, women wobble along under a fierce sun with water buckets on their heads, strung out in a winding line; monks at the temple debate whether to spend their alms money on lottery tickets or on going abroad to be monks there, since foreigners give more generously; the insomniac at the center of the film peels his last apple indoors while, out the window, a local pop song drifts across the hot brown fields: "I want to borrow a motorbike so I can take my girlfriend on a date."

In 14 Apples, Midi Z's camera mostly follows its subjects in a straight, tracking line. Under that gaze, the long, quiet rituals at the temple sit in interesting counterpoint to the stories of people in a remote, poor region trying to make a living inside the tide of global capital. As he puts it: "I think a lot of people who become monks in Myanmar aren't renouncing the mortal world. They're just walking into a different one."

Religious imagery is no rarity in this Burmese Chinese director's films. Myanmar's thick Buddhist atmosphere is one reason. In The Road to Mandalay, Lianqing, the female lead who has just smuggled herself into Thailand to work, often lies awake at night looking at a Buddha image stuck to the ceiling. Details like that came out of his earlier fieldwork in Bangkok, where he found that many Myanmar migrant workers who had gone abroad alone to make a living carried a Buddha statue, or a Buddha sticker, for peace of mind.

At the end of 2016, Midi Z's narrative feature The Road to Mandalay took six nominations at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards, including Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Director. Beyond the buzz around the casting of Kai Ko, who had been caught up in a drug scandal, the film's many nominations at Chinese-language and international festivals pushed this director — who works on the situation of ethnic Chinese in Myanmar — further into public view. His mentor, the director Hou Hsiao-hsien, once said of him: "He sees so many things the rest of us can't see!"

Midi Z was born into a family of Chinese soldiers in Lashio, a city on the China-Myanmar border in northern Myanmar. His grandfather came from Nanjing and was sent to Yunnan during the war against Japan to help build the Burma Road; during the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, that grandfather then took Midi Z's father from Yunnan to Myanmar. Midi Z is the youngest child in the family, nicknamed "Midi." Unlike his eldest brother and sister, who went out to work early to improve the family's lot, he grew up under a traditional scholar's education; his father taught him that "all pursuits are lowly, only study is noble." He remembers: "The education my father and my grandfather gave me, from the time I was small, was all the Three Character Classic kind. Why that kind? They didn't really understand it either. They just felt that once you'd learned it, you'd be better off than we were."

His father's generation of Myanmar Chinese left home for good. Whatever they still felt they belonged to, in terms of nationality they had already become "outsiders," to be scrutinized every time they crossed a border. Even so, his father believed the next generation had to carry the old things forward. Midi Z gives an example: as a boy he had to memorize the family genealogy. "These 24 generations, each generation's name-character had to be passed down — what my son should be named, for instance. These are all very Chinese ideas of family." He also told QDaily that, unlike second-generation immigrants in Western countries, ethnic Chinese in Myanmar are in fact unwilling to learn Burmese, partly out of Chinese cultural pride. As a child he went to a semi-underground Chinese-language school and read secondhand, simplified-character picture-book editions of Journey to the West; his childhood reading was almost identical to that of a child on the mainland. In the 1990s, guarding against cultural invasion, Myanmar blocked Chinese-language material tightly. So they read smuggled books instead — Lao She's short pieces, martial-arts novels, Reader's Digest — the simplified-character books that filled underground rental bookshops at the time.

At 16 he passed the entrance examination for a school in Taiwan, fulfilling his eldest sister's long-held "Taiwan dream." In 1982, Myanmar's military government had passed a new citizenship law under which only ethnic groups settled in Myanmar before 1823 could become citizens; the rest — Chinese, Indian and European immigrants and their descendants — were second-class citizens. They could not get ID cards, could not enter university, could not hold public office. For the children of Chinese immigrants then, the only way out was out of Myanmar. And free, developed Taiwan was where many Myanmar Chinese leaving home to make a living wanted to go.

Once he had his place at the school in Taiwan, the whole family spent another half a year raising the money for his passport and "taking care of" the officials, and at last he arrived. Modernity hit him the moment the plane landed: after more than a decade in a Myanmar where even the electricity supply was a problem, he saw a lift and an escalator for the first time at the airport. The campus's enormous library, its developed information networks — the ease of getting at information made up for how little his earlier life had held. "I think all of us probably had a certain curiosity and sensitivity about literature or art from early on, and once I got to Taiwan that curiosity was satisfied. Reading a lot of literature, novels — those things reshaped my mind," he told QDaily.

Knowing how hard things were for his family back in Myanmar, he started working for money on his second day in Taiwan. He had studied printing at a vocational high school, which included photography practicums, so he had some grounding in it, and at 18 he unexpectedly came by a DV camera and began earning extra money shooting wedding videos and high school graduation discs, sometimes a thousand or two at a time. Later, in college, he studied design, and as graduation approached a professor suggested he make his graduation project in the medium he was best at. In the end he spent seven days, found more than 100 women, and shot a short film about Taiwan's pigeon-racing culture, Paloma Blanca. Midi Z had planned to hand in his graduation work and go back to Myanmar. "There was no way for us to stay in Taiwan, because we were outsiders, unless you found a job locally. I didn't want to stay either. Back then I always felt Taiwan treated me as some kind of foreign species." He never expected his professor to send Paloma Blanca to that year's Busan International Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize.

"I often say film chose me, not the other way around." More than a decade later, in Beijing for a round of screenings and discussions, this is how he traced that first bond with film for a reporter. After Paloma Blanca won, some Taiwanese media companies came to ask whether he was interested in shooting commercials. He thought it over and decided to stay and make money first — enough to build his mother a house back home. The commercial work earned him money and wore his body out. Just as he was deciding, for the second time, to go back to Myanmar, his professor talked him out of it again, and suggested he go abroad to study film. But when he was admitted to NYU's film school, with its steep tuition, he didn't go. The reason he gave it up was simple: "I had some dreams about film, but reality pushes them down." There is little regret in his voice when he tells it.

Probably because soon afterward the first class of the Golden Horse Film Academy opened its enrollment. Hou Hsiao-hsien founded the academy in 2009 and took in a dozen or so students who wanted to work in film; Midi Z was one of them. Besides Hou himself, the instructors included Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang, Stanley Kwan, Mark Lee Ping-bin and Tu Duu-chih. Looking back on that stretch of study, Midi Z reached for a phrase from martial-arts novels and said it "opened up his two main meridians." The most valuable thing he took from the academy, he said, was "one thing Director Hou taught me — that you can make a film under any constraint, and any constraint can be turned into an advantage; and from Ang Lee, a very scientific script structure."

His unusual upbringing and background naturally tilted his filmmaking toward particular subjects. In 2011 he made his first feature, Return to Burma, about a young Myanmar man working in Taipei and the difficulties he meets on returning to his hometown — to some extent a true picture of Midi Z's own life at the time. Poor Folk, the second film in his "homecoming trilogy," shows the hardship and helplessness of ethnic Chinese at the bottom of Myanmar society drawn into smuggling, human trafficking and the drug trade. He says making films is "my own release." "It's a lot like having so many stories from friends and family, and film is just like keeping a diary — writing those stories down."

Last week, Midi Z brought his films to Beijing for a series of screenings and discussions. In a study outside the cinema, QDaily talked with him about the Chinese diaspora and about making films. He had already done five or six post-screening talks, but still seemed in good spirits, answering unhurriedly and with real sincerity.

Q = QDaily

Z = Midi Z

"Always an Outsider"

Q: Apart from your choice of subject, how else has being a Myanmar Chinese shaped your work?

Z: My great-grandfather and my grandfather were both from Nanjing. During the war against Japan they went to Yunnan, and from Yunnan on to Myanmar. I was born in Myanmar. In terms of geography, I seem to have no real connection to China. But my great-grandparents, my father and mother — their whole upbringing, education, background and culture came from China. They were Chinese. So the education and the influence they gave us was very traditional Chinese culture. That created a contradiction in our sense of who we were locally, because the country we lived in was Myanmar. Living in Myanmar meant we had to learn Burmese. In elementary school, for instance, we were required to wear a longyi (a kind of Myanmar tube skirt) — boys too. As ethnic Chinese, especially the boys, we didn't want to wear it. It felt strange; why should we have to? But in Myanmar you have to study Burmese, you have to be fluent in the Myanmar language. So on the question of identity we were always in a state of contradiction. When I was small, for instance, my great-grandfather's grave was in Wanding, in Dehong, Yunnan. Every time we went back to sweep it, the Chinese border officers we passed on the way would think: oh, you're foreigners! Even though we spoke Chinese and looked Chinese, they'd think — you're Myanmar people, you need Myanmar papers to get through. So it isn't just that your sense of identity is at odds with itself; it's that in ordinary daily life, the moment you cross a border, people put a label on you: you speak Chinese, you look Chinese, but your nationality is Myanmar. And in Myanmar, the Myanmar government and the governments around it think: you people look different from us, eat different food, speak a different language. You're outsiders, you're Chinese. So we end up belonging to neither side. In the end our sense of identity becomes "you're always an outsider." Wherever you are, you're a stranger to that place forever. You go to the United States, you don't belong to the United States either; you come to China, and your language, your accent, your character — everything about you has been shaped by Myanmar. You're no longer the person made by that family that moved from Nanjing to Yunnan. These things really can't be explained in a few sentences. This is the condition of outsiders everywhere in the world, and it can't be changed. But there's one advantage to it: you can always look at your hometown more calmly, more objectively. With a hometown, it's better to keep a little distance.

Q: Does the question of identity still trouble you now?

Z: Now and then it does. Especially when people try to place you — art films are easy to label. In Europe, everyone thinks I'm a Myanmar director, because the films are about Myanmar. Of course they can't tell what Myanmar's ethnic Chinese are. Out of Myanmar's 53 million people, 5 million are ethnic Chinese. Call it the relationship between Austria and Germany — it's hard to explain. They don't understand; they think everyone looks the same, that Myanmar couldn't possibly have that many Chinese, and so there are things they just don't get. But even in Taiwan, after I'd won a Golden Horse Award and been given Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year, which is an award for Taiwanese people — a lot of the time you feel that means they've accepted you as Taiwanese. And yet with many of my films, a lot of judges or audience members think, "What does this have to do with Taiwan?" And now, if I bring a film back to screen in China, audiences here feel: hm, this looks like a Myanmar film, but it also seems a bit Chinese, a bit like a Yunnan film. These are not things I get to decide. Over time I've leaned toward making work on other subjects — what I feel about places that aren't my native place, I want to shoot that too. Something with no connection at all to my hometown, to separation, to homesickness, to Myanmar; to work through a subject that isn't tied to one place. Maybe after making those, it'll be a little better for my own mind and body.

Making Something Requires a Sense of Intimacy

Q: You've made a lot of documentaries about life at the bottom of Myanmar society, like Jade Miners and City of Jade. They were shot under very difficult conditions — Myanmar restricts filmmaking strictly, and the mining areas are dangerous places in themselves. And documentary subjects, unlike trained actors, can be sensitive to the camera. How did you get past those difficulties?

Z: First, the shooting itself. Myanmar has never actually had an explicit rule banning documentary filming; it's narrative features that are restricted. When we were shooting narrative films we looked more like tourists — the gear was all small, and the crew was two or three people. So we'd shoot without a permit, and whenever we hit an obstacle I'd handle it myself. By handle it I mean I'd tell them, oh, we're students from Yangon shooting some local customs, that sort of thing. That usually solved it, because we weren't shooting politics, we weren't trying to shoot anything subversive; we were documenting the real stories of people at the bottom of this city and adapting them, that's all. Documentaries were more complicated, because in the jade city you have to get the camera in, past many checkpoints, and you have to find a way around them. Where it got troublesome was the restrictions on the shooting itself: you can't freely use a tripod the way an ordinary filmmaker does, or make the kind of image people call poetic or gorgeous. But when we were really shooting documentary, so-called aesthetics simply didn't exist. Filming on the sly under those conditions, you can't design any composition, you understand? Sometimes when a mine accident happened, you'd get there, switch the camera on, get shoved and jolted around, and the framing would come out completely crooked. If you got it, that's good enough — don't fuss over it, because those things are real. That's roughly my thinking.

Q: You seem to put a lot of weight on "reality" in film — you've shot many documentaries yourself, and your narrative features lean toward realism too. You've also said "the essence of film is a state." As you understand it, what's the best way to bring out that "state"?

Z: First, a sense of intimacy. I think that with any work of art, the maker needs their own unique bond with the work — a bond that belongs only to them, with the work, with that land, that person, that question. That intimacy is theirs alone; other people have theirs, but everyone's is different. It has to be unique. Second, I think, is technique. Intimacy comes from something more subjective, personal, emotional; technique comes from something more objective. When you examine your own editing and shooting, whether the framing is crooked or poetic, putting those pieces together takes technique, and that technique takes a great deal of time to train — you take other people's work and imitate it, learn the form, learn the technique. Once you've imitated it and gotten good at it, you can break it. And once you break it, your sense of intimacy shows through more strongly.

Q: I've heard you often add improvised elements while shooting — the lizard in The Road to Mandalay, for instance, was a last-minute change. Can you share other examples like that?

Z: Sure. Besides the lizard in The Road to Mandalay, there's the scene where A-Guo furiously stokes that furnace — that was added on the spot too. The textile factory wasn't using the furnace anymore, only now and then, and when I saw it I was delighted; I thought it looked great, and that a scene of raging fire would suit a man venting his energy after taking drugs. It's just instinct, I don't really understand it myself. I lean heavily on the location. If you asked me to shoot a scene in a study, say, how would I do it? If all I could do was imagine a study, what I wrote would be clichés. But once I get to the actual place, I pick up a certain charge that only comes from being there. So when I'm scouting locations I rewrite the script a great deal, and once the script is set, after I've seen the actors, I rewrite it a great deal again, adjusting the character to fit the actor.

Q: You've said you don't quite agree that "life is like a play" — you've said "film matters too little, life is what matters." That's a rare view for a director. Could you explain what you mean?

Z: In life, the drama of sorrow and joy I've come across around me, among friends and family, is nowhere near anything a film can sum up. Film only skims the surface, conveying or venting a little of what real life makes you feel. That's all it does. That's why I think "life is like a play" is wrong: a play isn't enough to speak to the weight or the happiness of a life. When a whole family is scattered and left with nowhere to go, when political or economic change corrupts human nature in every direction — one film really can't tell that. A film can only be made by following a hundred years of audience viewing habits, especially a mainstream film. At most you can deliver a sense of entertainment: you sob your way through a romance, that's entertainment; you feel elated watching something, that's entertainment too. It's very hard for two hours to make you think, "oh, that's just like my life." How could it? It can't. It's too light. Film is very light, far too slight. If you asked me whether film could be thrown away or life could be thrown away, I wouldn't even have to think — of course film doesn't matter, life matters more.

Only a Rating System Can "Force Out" Good Chinese-Language Films

Q: I read that you think "Taiwanese cinema has always cycled between the commercial and the artistic" — the reflective "Taiwan New Cinema" emerging, for instance, after a wave of commercial, vulgar films in the early 1980s. Do you still see it that way? And what do you make of the mainland film market?

Z: I do. The Taiwan film market isn't doing well now, so the next step will probably be fewer commercial films and more local films trying to examine or answer the current state of things. But there's no better or worse about it. This era will simply produce certain things.

I'll say it plainly: because the mainland has no rating system, it has produced a lot of... I think there are extremely capable filmmakers there, but they have no rating-based distribution platform that would let them put their energy and potential to work. And I don't mean that about art films — I mean commercial films. Real commercial cinema should be rich and varied, and I think these directors, these elders, have to be able to express themselves freely. Look at our elders — Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, still active in today's main commercial market. I don't believe the films they make are as simple as The Great Wall. I've studied them, we've followed them; there's no way they're that simple. But with no rating system now, what they're best at can't carry through into today's commercial film stories. They can't do it. So this is all there is. That's the first point. Second, on the whole, audiences' viewing experience is fairly easy to satisfy — or, under this intensely fast capitalist pace of life, people probably feel the kind of entertainment of the 1980s is still enough today. What everyone hopes for from entertainment is, deep down, still stuck in the 1980s: ghost films to scare you; things to make you happy, jokes, someone to curse at, as long as you can feel a bit of satire, that's fine. But many directors are good at more than that; their skill goes well beyond it. They have no way to express it, so what's needed is a genuinely effective rating system. This film children can't watch, this film only people over 20 can watch — whatever form it takes is fine. Under such a system I think Chinese cinema, Chinese-language cinema, will really be forced out into the open.

Why is Hollywood so formidable? Every kind of ethnicity can express all sorts of things there. There's violence, there's sexual desire. Can violence and sexual desire not exist? Desire and violence are simply part of human nature. These things can be expressed in novels and in literature, and they need to be expressed in film too. Only once they're expressed can a film become a work of art. It's also an entertainment product, and inside the world of entertainment it influences consumers, and consumers then follow along and... maybe "progress" isn't the word — they change their viewing habits a little.

Q: A lot of Chinese-language films still use Western filmmaking methods — Hitchcock's standard shot grammar, Hollywood's three-act structure and so on. But you've said "Chinese-language film needs to build its own narrative model." What would that model look like?

Z: I think it isn't just Chinese-language film. A lot of directors who didn't come out of a mainstream Western culture kept the cultural traits and the aesthetic of their own context after they entered Hollywood. Mexican directors, for instance, have made plenty of mainstream films that sold well and got the press talking. They kept the traits and symbols native to their own culture and added Hollywood's technical resources, and that gave Hollywood films another look. For Chinese cinema, or Chinese-language film, the first thing is that the storytelling has too many complex, rich elements; if you force them into a Hollywood three-act structure, a lot of it can't be told clearly and has to be cut. So the form of a Chinese-language film may not be three acts. It might be one act, or ten. This isn't some simple, abstract, aesthetic matter — it's technique. That technique might be built or matched using things like Chinese opera and crosstalk. It isn't based on the way Hollywood tells stories. Of course, given how impatient audiences are now, since everyone can watch on a phone, no audience can sit through a three-hour film anymore, and given commercial interests no one would make one. But if time allowed, could there be another kind of multi-part film? Say a film of ten chapters, eight minutes each. That becomes something like the idea behind Chinese poetry, done as a mainstream commercial film. Some places in Spain are already doing this — ten stories making up one very commercial film. Only by thinking from all these angles can you bring out the traits native to a culture's own context and let them shape the film form itself.

Q: Foreign audiences aren't very used to that kind of narrative aesthetic?

Z: Not really — that aesthetic has been around since the 1960s, there just hasn't been any new innovation. That includes us. We haven't broken through at the level of technique either. Then there's the storytelling: our narratives may not satisfy European curiosity the way Mexico or South America can, which are a bit more ferocious.

Q: Which directors and films matter most to you? In an earlier interview I read that you've watched Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries many times.

Z: I watched Bergman's Wild Strawberries when I was graduating from college, facing the question of whether to stay in Taiwan or leave. I didn't really understand it then, but I felt like that old man — suddenly old, about to retire. That feeling, of having to give up a state, a place you've been looking at. So of course the impact was bigger. That's as a film fan, not as a director studying the film. Otherwise, plenty of Chinese-language directors go their own way. The story Director Hou tells in A Time to Live and a Time to Die was very familiar to me. My grandmother and people like her were the ones who wanted to go back to China; my grandmother developed Alzheimer's in the end too. His film drew out a resonance with my own life. That's more personal. But in artistic terms there are a lot of them, I think. Even now I quite like Spielberg's films — very commercial, very classic, but I think they're good, complete, full. On the mainland I've always liked Zhang Yimou's films; I think they're full too, full enough. I've read plenty of reviews saying his work has gotten worse, but to me he's never made a film that missed. I can always see the level he's working at. There's only one I didn't much like, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop — I couldn't really sit through it.

Q: A few years ago you mentioned you were preparing a science fiction film. How is it going? Can you say anything about it?

Z: I've written a first draft of the script. It's not about some new vehicle appearing, or the world around you looking futuristic — nothing like that. It isn't Star Wars, and it isn't robots. Not that kind of science fiction. It's a concept about time, fairly existentialist: when things can go as fast as they possibly can, what is it that still exists? If you went from here to the United States in one second, that means you crossed more than ten thousand kilometers in a second — where's the space of that speed in between? The settings would be ruins, forests, Dunhuang, deserts. Right. The other one I might try to shoot in the next year or two is simpler, not high-concept — a simpler science-fiction love story than the one I just described. But that first one is about a person's crossing as they leave home, and this crossing isn't the cold, tall-buildings kind: the settings are all ruins, borders, ancient civilizations that have been entertaining people for thousands of years, that sort of thing.

Q: Most of your work so far still examines how ethnic Chinese in Myanmar live. Have you thought about other subjects? What would they be?

Z: Yes. I think we're still fairly young, still learning. So it's a matter of timing; I'm a pragmatist. I don't sit idle either. Take that science fiction film — at the time it was fairly simple, I had a concept, spent time writing and working it over, wrote it out, and found I didn't yet have the ability to make it. On one side there's the organizing and managing ability to bring a project from nothing into being. On the other there's the ability to rally people — your ability to rally money. If you shoot without that, you'll only let people who don't believe in your creative ability come in and spoil a good pot of soup. Better not to put it out yet. But you can't sit idle either. Those are finished scripts already. You just set them aside.

Q: What advice would you give young people who want to work in film?

Z: Do more, think less. Look after your body and mind.

Q: Do you have any worries or anxieties about society?

Z: No. I've never worried or felt anxious about society, because I think every society and every group forms according to its own patterns and cycles, and things reverse once they reach an extreme. I think it's best to let things take their course. But I'll look after what I can look after. I have family, I have a company to look after, and society will be fine.

About the interviewee:

Midi Z is a Burmese Chinese film director who moved to Taiwan at 16 to study and later took a master's degree in design. He is one of the few directors in the film world who makes ethnic Chinese in Myanmar his subject. His major works include The Road to Mandalay, Ice Poison, Return to Burma and City of Jade. His films have been selected for the Berlin and Busan festivals, among other international festivals, and he has won Best Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker of the Year at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards, and Best Director at a Swiss film festival, among other honors.

Cover image / Seashore Image Productions, The Road to Mandalay