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Director’s Profile

Born in Manchuria and coming of age during the Cultural Revolution, Miaoyan Zhang barely had a chance to see movies. In the 90s, Miaoyan got an opportunity to study art at UC Berkeley, which enabled him to watch foreign movies non-stop. Miaoyan started writing stories about contemporary China. None of them were published due to state censorship. In the summer of 2006, he shot his first movie Xiaolin Xiaoli. The film premiered at the Busan International Film Festival 2007, was given an award at the Geneva Black Movie Film Festival and the Tiburon International Film Festival, and was invited to participate at festivals in Bradford, Barcelona and Taipei. Black Blood, his second feature film, received post-production support from the Hubert Bals Fund, and premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2011, where it received the NETPAC Award for best Asian film. It then screened at various film festivals such as Jeonju, Cannes ACID, Thessaloniki and Saint Petersburg where it won the Best Film. The film was released in France in November 2011.

Synopsis

When his mother disappears one autumn, a thirteen-year-old boy leaves his younger sister with his grandfather and goes on a journey in search of his mother. The boy wanders alone along the dead yellow wasteland that is the valley of the polluted Yellow River. He has nothing, except a letter from his mother, the worn clothes he is wearing and some scavenged food. He reaches a blackened coalmining town in the Yellow River estuary where he is enslaved in an oil refinery that turns waste into oil for human consumption. When the poisonous fumes have nearly killed him, he befriends another lost soul: a bald boy who introduces him to a gang of thieves, and to drugs. His life now revolves around stealing, smoking drugs and the search for his mother, her
envelope being the only reminder of his former life. Every time he sees a woman that might be his mother, he follows her; every time he is disappointed. The boy escapes into drug-fueled fantasies, dancing to tango and revolutionary Peking opera on the bank of the Yellow River. One day, the boy steals a banana from a market and is caught. The market sellers decide to punish him by breaking a limb of the boy’s own choosing. He chooses his left arm and continues his journey along the river. Scavenging for food from a garbage heap, he finds a photograph of a woman that looks like his mother. He dances frantically and
ecstatically to tango and opera with his useless broken arm. When he has decided it is better to die, he walks towards a mountain that to him looks like a corner of heaven. A railway tunnel runs through the mountain, and when the boy is about to enter it, thick black clouds are spat out announcing the advance of a train. It thunders past the boy, knocking him down and blowing away the letter from his mother. When the train disappears, his desire to die has also vanished. The boy walks back through the snow to his grandfather and sister. Upon arriving in his village he learns that his grandfather has sold his sister. With nothing but a photo of his sister and the clothes he is wearing, the boy embarks upon yet another journey along the dirty Yellow River.

Achievements

2014 Busan International Film Festival
2014 Vancouver International Film Festival
2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam
2015 Goteborg Film Festival
2015 Vilnius International Film Festival
2015 Zerkalo International Film Festival - Best film
2015 Fajr International Film Festival
2015 Jerusalem Film Festival

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