with the footage because you never know – maybe sometimes there is a story there, other times there isn’t. Anyway, I was there shooting until the very end. I thought that whatever I was going to do with this footage, I would decide afterwards.
Can you speak a little about the scenes with the fisherman using electrified fishing poles in the ponds and rivers nearby? I feel like they act as a counterpoint to the scenes concentrating on Mrs. Fang and make the film closer to a narrative feature, rather than simply a documentary.
How large was your crew when you started shooting? We were three people. I was there, together with the other two DPs. From the very start, the film is amazingly intimate. I was wondering how long it took to build that trust with the family. I actually knew the family for a long time. And it was they who called me to go there. Since we already knew each other, that allowed me to be there with them in that way. I know that the more time that passed and the sicker that Mrs. Fang got, the more under pressure the family were. Everybody was very nervous, since we all knew she was going to die. But they accepted that I was there. In no way did they interrupt or bother me while I was shooting. Just to follow up on what you said, it sounds like there are two aspects to that: one is that being close enough to the family, it’s okay for you, who is not a family member, to be there watching somebody who is that sick. But it’s another thing to be allowed to film that sickness. So I’m wondering what the family’s evolving relationship with the act of filming the sickness was. In these circumstances, there is obviously a lot of pressure. But again, I was invited there by the family. The attitude was that it was good for me to be there. I stayed there seven days, until the very end – that is, Mrs. Fang’s death. But around the fifth day, I felt that something was different. The pressure also came from the neighbourhood. Neighbours were going to visit Mrs. Fang all the time, and my filming there was making things uncomfortable. So I decided that for the fifth day there would be no filming. I started again the next day. I spent time talking to the family, and I knew that the son and daughter of Mrs. Fang accepted me being there. They wanted me to film this. But the neighbours were another story ; they didn’t feel comfortable.
All these scenes were shot at the same time as the main scenes in Mrs. Fang’s home. On the second day, Mrs. Fang’s brother said, suddenly, “Come fishing with us!” But yes, we were filming these at the same time as filming all the scenes with Mrs. Fang sick in her home. I accepted, thinking that it would be good to follow them. I did all the shooting at night – if you remember they were all night scenes – and then I came back to the house. Then it started to make sense. I realized that I needed to describe the village in which she was living because she lived there for so many years. I wanted to give a sense of the environment she was living in. Fishing was the main activity of the village, so that was important. And all the people she was living with for all those years – all of this was part of her life. I don’t mean that she was going fishing with the men every night, but of course she was surrounded by these kinds of activities. It is part of life in that village. I was curious about how you approach filming a sick subject, how you ensure that that person maintains their dignity, and that there’s never a sense of exploiting a real person’s pain to create an image of pain. I am a filmmaker. I make films. And I keep asking myself about cinema all the time and what it is about. What we are supposed to watch, what are we supposed to see in cinema? When I was there I was thinking a lot about the subject. Cinema needs these kinds of stories. Each of us has to face death sooner or later ; cinema might find its own way to describe death, to tell stories of death.
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