My Sunny Sunday

Can you guess where I went?

The plum blossoms are blooming around Shanghai, a sign of spring, right?

Tuyade Hunshi / Tuya’s Marriage, 2006

Directed by Wang Quan’An

Produced by Yan Ju Gang

Mandarin with English subtitles

Screenwriters: Wang Quan’An and Lu Wei

Cast: Yu Nan

The film is set in cold and arid Inner Mongolia where aggressive industrialization has had a huge impact on the natural environment and nomadic way-of-life of its largely Mongolian population. The farmers have ridiculously harsh lives reduced to grinding struggle for physical and economic subsistence.

Wang Quan’An, born in 1965 and ethnically Mongolian himself, made this film to record what he sees as the final phase of Mongolian life in the ‘grasslands’ before they are forced to move by the government or by the impossibility of survival. He set the story and filmed in the area where his mother was born and, in classic 6^th

Generation style, used many non-professional local actors in principal roles. The farmers Bater, Senge and Zhaya are all played by themselves, as is the personification of industrial wealth, Baolier. The startling exception is Yu Nan who plays Tuya. She was born in 1978 and graduated from the Beijing Film Academy’s Acting Department and was discovered by Wang Quan’An in his 2000 film Lunar Eclipse, for which she won Best Actress Award at Deauville Asian Film Festival. She won her second Best Actress Award at the Paris Film Festival for her role in Wang Quan’An’s second film The Story of Ermei, 2004.

Tuya is a beautiful and resilient shepherdess in a desert-like area of Inner Mongolia. Her husband, Bater, who she loves, was injured whilst digging a well three years before the film begins. They have two children and Tuya is the matriarch of the family, tending her herd of a hundred sheep on her camel, lugging water from the well 30thirty kilometres away, cooking and caring for her family. Whilst helping her horseman neighbour Senge, she injures her back. Under protest she agrees to divorce her husband and find a new healthy spouse, but only on the condition that the replacement will take care of her Bater. Tuya refuses to submit to the hardship of her life or to government and personal pressure she struggles against and remains determined to preserve her family life. Whilst a love story, there is no happy-ever-after ending, but there is a resolution that recognizes the ambiguities of her life.

Tuya’s Marriage is no ethnographic curiosity, Wang Quan’An and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (who was also the screenwriter for Farewell My Concubine and To Live), portray a world of hardship that nevertheless is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the familiar needs for companionship and material well-being, with greed, lust, jealousy and despair all making appearances.

Awards:

Berlin Film Festival 2007, Golden Bear

Chicago Film Festival 2007, Best Actress

Chicago Film Festival 2007, Special Jury prize