Lu Qingyi Is Wearing Himself Out Selling Four Springs. He Says He Came Into This World Just to Play

Selling a movie, though, is clearly another matter.

Lu Qingyi, a Guizhou native, is still out working to sell Four Springs, the film he shot himself.

Between December 20 and January 11, the marketing team booked 17 roadshow stops. Other promotional appearances ran alongside them, built around the film and around the book of the same name, Four Springs, published January 1. That worked out to a flight to another city every day or two.

On the day he spoke with QDaily, Lu had just flown back to Beijing from Jinan, the previous roadshow stop, for that evening's premiere. A little after 3 p.m., at the Wanda Hotel, he tore open a takeout box of roast duck a staff member had brought him; he couldn't find chopsticks anywhere, so he ate with his hands. His cheeks were flushed and he smoked one cigarette after another. He called himself a "workaholic": over the past ten-odd days, on the road through the country's big cities, he had been sleeping about two hours a night.

Four Springs is a documentary about the daily life of Lu's parents. Lu shot and cut the early version single-handed. It won Best Documentary at the FIRST International Film Festival in Xining in late 2017, and later earned two nominations at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards, for Best Documentary and Best Editing.

Four Springs opened in theaters on January 4. It got 2.1% of screenings on opening day and took in 656,000 yuan; on day two its share fell to 1.1%, though box office rose 49%. From day four to day seven the share recovered and held at 1.6% to 1.7%, but box office slid steadily. By day eight the share was down to 0.2%; both it and box office ticked up afterward, but only slightly. As of January 13, the film had taken 8.507 million yuan in total. The distributor has lately started signing up audiences for booking-only special screenings in areas where the film gets few slots.

Lu can't afford not to sell the film, because his family's story is the material most likely to build word of mouth for it. Someone may want to see the movie because his life story struck a chord, or because a family scene he described moved them, or because they are on Douban and have watched how often he has been posting lately. All of that travels more easily than what is actually on screen: Lu's parents playing instruments, singing mountain songs, dancing, stuffing sausages, growing flowers, keeping bees, waiting for the swallows to come back.

His older brother, Lu Qingsong, pitched in too, writing a promotional song for the film called "You Are Spring." But one family's fine-grained quiet life is hard to sell to people who know nothing about it — hard enough to get them into a theater.

Qu Jingdong, a sociology professor at Peking University, said: "This film uses the camera to feel out a life, and that kind of experience can't be summed up by book learning — you find it naturally. It isn't really 'creation' either; it's just wanting, naturally, to record what is lovable about your parents. It also lets us see that Chinese life is 'cyclical, coming around again and again.'"

Lu decided to make Four Springs in 2015. He was 42, had been a "Beijing drifter" for nearly thirty years, and had tried all kinds of work: painting, football, book editing, mining, advertising design, photography.

In 2013 he started a photo album on Douban called "Going Home," sharing daily life in Dushan and scenes of his family. It drew a good number of likes and reposts, and two diary entries he published afterward, "My Dad" and "My Mom," set off another wave of reposting and discussion.

After years away, Lu began to look at his hometown differently. In "If You Want to Do It, Just Do It," an essay in the new book that shares the film's title, he wrote: "My eye, my thinking, my habits had all been rebuilt, and that distance turned me into an onlooker in my own hometown. Once I no longer had to wrestle with life to get by, I had a new vantage point on how people live back home." He started with photographs; then, needing a camera for work, he bought a model that could shoot video. "From the 2013 Spring Festival on, I shot like a madman every day I was home. I wanted to get everything."

At first Lu meant only to make a family keepsake; by 2015 he had decided to turn it into a documentary. Press coverage has repeated the same account of what tipped him over: that he read an interview with Hou Hsiao-hsien in which the director said, "If you want to shoot it, go shoot it — how else would you know how to start!" In the interview, though, Lu was wary of such tidy cause-and-effect stories: "There wasn't really any trigger. You do something long enough and you naturally want to do it better."

The Lu family has a tradition of taking photographs to mark things. At a post-screening talk at Peking University's innovation and entrepreneurship space, Lu remembered that when he was small his parents took the three children to a photo studio every year for a portrait. Then a fire in 1999 left only a fifth of the family's old photographs. "The next day, my mom's first instinct when she got home was to run upstairs and look for the photos. Photos are precious memories in our family." The fire also destroyed the camcorder his sister had bought their parents with her first paycheck. In 2008 she bought a new digital camcorder; Lu's father couldn't put it down, and taught himself to cut footage in Ulead VideoStudio. The decade-old video spliced into Four Springs is his father's work.

"So when I had the money for a video camera, on the third day I went home and started shooting my parents. One night I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing. I wanted so badly to film them, and to film Dushan County, to film my childhood and my teens." After his sister died in late 2014, watching his parents age by the day made the job of recording them more urgent.

When he started shooting, Lu had no cinematic instinct; it only sharpened later. One visible change in the film is fewer close-ups and more wide shots. "You have to get outside the frame and look at things from a third party's point of view. You need a whole sense of the environment, to understand it and to show it — thinking about how to use the environment to convey cold, or a place bursting with life, and slowly putting your own feelings into that. You don't want it to come out like one of those ads for a scruffy town on the edge of a city, right?"

Because his family was long used to being photographed and filmed, Lu said he felt no real distance while shooting the documentary; he still took part in ordinary family life. But his sister's death was extremely hard on the man behind the camera. According to a report in City Pictorial, Lu cried until he passed out at the funeral; when he came to, his brother was holding him up, and his mother asked, "Are you going to keep filming, or are you going to carry a wreath?" Lu chose to keep filming. His sister had left Dushan more than thirty years earlier, and that day her childhood friends and many relatives had come from far away. Rather than carry a wreath, he wanted to record everyone seeing her off. "It was all there in it — the feeling, the loyalty."

In the second half of the film, one of the old tapes Lu spliced in is footage his father shot in 1997 of the whole family watching the Spring Festival Gala: his mother has already fallen asleep against the sofa, and his father asks the three children, "When was the last time we were all together for New Year? 1993? Or 1989?" Lu explained that money was the reason — they couldn't afford train tickets — and that only after 1997 did the family start reuniting every New Year. In an essay called "Our Parents' Debt," he described how, many years later, he finally learned the secret behind his parents' poverty despite decades of grinding work — teaching plus sidelines raising rabbits, doing embroidery, raising pigs. To build the house and to help support the extended family, they had taken on a large debt, and it took them more than ten years to pay it off. They never mentioned it to their children, and never complained.

"For them there are no hardships, only problems to solve," Lu said. The signature line on his Douban page says the same thing: "Life has no hardships, only experiences."

His father, Lu Yunkun, was a physics teacher who grew up in a small mountain village in neighboring Luodian County. He "loved going to school" — so much that "second place counted as failure." Qinghua Middle School was the best school in Guiyang at the time, and he contacted the principal himself to win a place. From then on he walked to school: from Luodian to Guiyang, carrying a sack of rice each time, a week on the road. He later got into Guizhou Normal University and joined the school's military band, which is where he picked up the twenty-odd instruments he plays and sings along to in Four Springs. After retiring, he taught himself to type and to edit video. "He just refuses to lose. He's incredibly eager to learn."

Across four Spring Festivals, from 2013 to 2016, Lu piled up nearly 250 hours of footage. In the edit he cut the material he had first planned to include on Dushan's people and landscape, narrowing the film to the two people he knew best, his parents. Twenty months later he had it down to a roughly two-hour version for its first screening.

That screening was at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, on October 30, 2017; Lu brought his parents to the venue. In a talk for Yixi, he recalled that his mother could hardly believe it right up to the moment they left home: "You mean a real big screen?" The Ullens screening felt to Lu like a dream. The audience applauded and called his parents up on stage, and his mother laughed and said, "If I'd known you were making a movie, I'd have dressed up nicer." His father took off his hat and bowed to the audience, held the microphone for a beat, and said in a shaking voice: "Today I saw myself on the big screen. I think this film must be dedicated to us. Thank you, my son."

Lu Qingyi was born in 1973 in Mawei Town, Dushan County, Guizhou. Mawei sits in a long, narrow valley, classic karst country, ringed by rising peaks. When Lu was in second grade his father was transferred back to the county seat, and the family moved to Dushan.

His parents were strict with him. His brother, Lu Qingsong, had been taken away at 10 by a professor from the Central Institute for Nationalities as a "gifted student," and his sister started college the same year, leaving Lu the only child at home. School itself, though, put no pressure on him. "Studying was an easy thing," he said.

The trouble was fighting. Lu once recalled in a diary entry that, being short, he was the school "punching bag," always getting picked on; a little older, he finally "came out of the cocoon" as a "little tyrant," making trouble everywhere, addicted to fighting, less and less in control of himself. The only place he still trembled was in front of his parents.

The "rebellion" peaked at 15. After a serious clash with his school, Lu ran away from home to Shenyang, to his sister. Once her wedding was over, he followed his brother, then teaching music at Tsinghua University, to Beijing. His brother found him a high school there, but he went on fighting and skipping class, drifting around the city, sleeping by the wild lakes at the Old Summer Palace. He changed schools twice and still never graduated. What his family asked of him dropped to "don't commit a crime, don't die."

At Tsinghua, Lu studied oil painting with a friend of his brother's. In the same stretch he turned out to be a decent footballer, and within six months he was a name on the Tsinghua pitch, training with the Liaoning provincial team. For a long time he dreamed of playing for the national team. Lu said this was "the only dream I'd had since I was 15." It ended when an accident injured his left foot.

In 1997, Lu finally landed his first job, editing "blockbuster books" at a publishing house near Renmin University. He gathered material and commissioned manuscripts day after day, on subjects from Osama bin Laden to a female college student's diary to Zhuge Liang, all of which sold very well. He admits it was "all a swindle for money" and "none of it was mine," but he still found it "a lot of fun," because it was "the first job I found after two years of looking." The office started at 9:30; he was working by 7, slipped out in the afternoon to play football, then came back after a shower to work late. His pay went from 800 yuan to 3,000 within months.

Two years later Lu went off to a mine in Luodian, Guizhou, to try pure physical labor. Six months after that he was back in Beijing, teaching himself web design, taking freelance jobs, then joining an advertising company; in 2005 he opened an ad agency of his own. In 2008 he bought his first DSLR and took up photography for fun, later taking client work as well.

Very small things could redirect his career. He quit the publishing house over one line from his boss. One afternoon Lu asked for time off as usual, saying he had to move house. The boss knew perfectly well there were football boots in his bag, and always let him go anyway. "But that day something must have snapped in him, and he had to say to me, 'How many times have you moved this month? If you go today, don't come back to work.' If he'd just said no, fine, I wouldn't have gone. But he said that, so — all right, I didn't come back. I decide things very simply. Basically two seconds and it's decided."

Becoming a photographer came out of something just as small: "One time I had a great time playing with a friend's point-and-shoot, and a few days later he took it back, and I felt awful all of a sudden." He went to Zhongguancun and, half talked into it, bought his first DSLR. He photographed the clutter around the house, the botanical garden, the hutongs, but after a burst of enthusiasm he got bored: "Everything I shot tasted the same." So he went online to look at other people's good photographs, started studying composition, and, on a friend's advice, bought books.

As Lu sees it, no line of work ranks above another. "Don't take your social identity seriously; just live earnestly," he said. He told QDaily: "I'm full of curiosity about this world. I came into this world just to play."

In 2014 he rented a small courtyard house in a village outside Beijing, where he still lives with his brother, for 15,000 yuan a year. Beyond rent, he spends 600 to 1,000 yuan a month. Lu calls himself a man with "no particular needs": "I'm not all that interested in a comfortable life. Comfort, for me, comes mostly from how I feel."

Lu's next film will be a drama, working title Youth, with him as both director and screenwriter, based on his own teenage years in Dushan. "I'm curious about every kind of film — gunfight movies, art films, 'deeply moving films.' I want to try every one of them in my lifetime."

Cover image: Douban