After a five-year wait, Chinese-American director Dayyan Eng's (or
Wu Shixian) short film
Bus 44, reached viewers via the
Internet.
The 11-minute film features a female bus driver who picks up a
young male hitchhiker on a deserted country road. Although the man
attempts to engage the driver in conversation, she's not
interested, and he takes a seat. The next stop sees the bus boarded
by two robbers who will test the character of everyone on the bus.
The film starts all bright and breezy and takes a dark twist that
is surprisingly brutal.
"I have always been interested in social psychology and wanted
to do a film about how people react under certain stressful
circumstances," the director said.
"The story attracts me not only because it has an interesting
plot with a twist, but mostly because the underlying theme is even
more haunting than the events that take place."
He said he intentionally made this film with a certain ambiguity
of time and place. "This story could have taken place anywhere in
the world," he said.
Bus 44 has won a string of plaudits from festivals
around the world. It was the first Chinese short film to win an
award at the Venice Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival in
2001. Unfortunately, as there is essentially no market for short
films in China at the present time, this is a movie to just look
out for rather than set out to buy.
Eng's ability to tell stories in a fresh way might be attributed
to his multi-ethnic family background. Born in Taiwan Province, Eng
studied film arts in the United States and transferred to Beijing
Film Academy in 1995 where he finished his undergraduate studies in
directing.
"I grew up with two cultures and I'm using that to my advantage.
But it's not intentional," he said. "My friends here laugh at
something, and my friends in America laugh at the same thing. I'm
more interested in the similarities in humanity rather than the
differences."
A 35mm short film he wrote and directed in 1997, East 22nd
Street, also won awards and nominations at eight international
film festivals, and was acquired by a French company for exclusive
rights. Later that year, Thomas Wright, screenwriter of New
Jack City and Godfather III, contacted him to
co-write a new film called Lucky Star. Although the
project was shelved due to creative differences, the experience was
inspiring. "It really opened another door," he says. "I couldn't
find scripts I liked, so why not write them myself?"
While directing TV commercials in 1999, Eng completed the script
of his first feature film Waiting Alone, and began
shopping it around to production companies. "Besides writing and
directing, I also had to turn into a producer because no one
understood what I wanted to do with this film," he says.
Though more people became interested in supporting Waiting
Alone financially due to the success of Bus 44, it was still
an uphill climb for Eng. "Winning prizes for Bus 44 made
things easier," says Eng. "But when you're a new film director,
it's difficult for investors to take a risk on you doing a
different kind of film."
"A lot of people think that movies about young people should
cost a lot of money. It's just too fixed. So I ended up starting my
own private production company to produce the film." Shooting for
Waiting Alone finally began.
The black comedy is about young people falling in love and stars
Xia Yu, Gong Beibi (who also starred in Bus 44), Gao Qi,
Li Bingbing and a group of older movie stars in small part
appearances.
Few so-called Chinese youth films succeed in moving beyond the
underground genre, though the film won wide popularity among
Chinese young people, especially university students. "Most of the
films about youth in China are made by people in their 40s," he
says. "That means the things they're talking about were really
relevant to past decades, not right now."
With his Bus 44 opened to the viewers, 30-year-old Eng
has certainly gained acceptance and support from the local film
industry, despite being a "foreign" director. "I don't think of
myself as an American or a Chinese. I think people in the world
have similarity to some extent," he said.
"I want to be in the state of director Ang Lee, who can find his
film angle both in China and abroad. The globe is like a big
amusement park. As long as the story is good, I can always express
my thought in filmmaking."
(China Daily April 11, 2007)
