TURTLE ROCK

Director/Cinematographer
/Sound/Editing: XIAO XIAO 
Producer:Lin Lin
original music : Jason Hou
Sound Designer:William Hsieh 
Genre:Cultural、Human Interests、Experimental Documentary、
Discovery and Lifestyle
Nation of production: CN 
Language: Chinese dialect 
Format: 4K
Length: 101min

记录电影《团鱼岩》

导演/摄影/录音/剪辑: 萧潇 
制片人:林林
配乐 : Jason Hou
声音设计:William Hsieh 
主演:  杨桂秀/ 刘小军 / 刘烨 /李泽华
类型:文化、人文、实验性纪录片、生活形态 
制片国家/地区: 中国 CN 
语言: 中文方言 
规格: 4K
片长: 101分钟


The film poetically flows around the daily lives of three generations – their chores, prays and mundane concerns in an isolated tiny mountain village in China. The piling mountains, with astonishing beauty and solemnity, tightly binds them together and enfetters their fates. Just as the giant “Turtle Rock” situated at the gate of the village, the ancestral mythos witnesses and echoes with the villagers’ present existence, and triggers an open experience of nostalgia.

The film evolves around the daily life of three generations in a tiny mountain village. 80-years-old grandma still labors hard for the family. She burns incense and prays day by day for the fear of upcoming death, and asks her son to come back for company. After her son returns from outside work, he can only do odd jobs in the woods and becomes increasingly impoverished and anxious. Her grandson, tired of being migrant worker in city, back to the mountains and starts his business of raising chickens, but ends up with a complete defeat and being heavily indebted. Meanwhile, her neighbor uncle Li unwillingly comes back home for his eye being injured in industrial job, and suddenly loses all source of income…
The piling mountains tightly binds them together and enfetters their fates, just as the giant “Turtle Rock” situated at the gate of the village – it is said that a turtle endeavored to cultivate itself into the heavenly realm, but fell down and being dismembered by the Thunder God, and then transferred into a rock – the village is named after the rock, and also echoes from this heritage.

影片圍繞著壹個小山村中三代人的日常生活而展開:年近八旬的外婆仍在不停勞作,操持家務。她恐懼日益臨近的大限,每日燒香拜佛,並要求外地打工的兒子回到身邊。舅舅回村後只能靠山吃山,拮據度日,生活日益艱難和迷茫;而孫子厭倦了打工,回到山裏飼養土雞,卻創業失敗,負債累累;同時,鄰居李叔在外工傷弄瞎了眼睛,也迫不得已回到山裏休養,頓時失去了經濟來源……
重巒疊章的大山緊緊束縛著他們的命運,正如村口的那塊名為團魚巖的巨石,相傳有只神鱉苦苦修行升天,卻被天雷擊中,身首異處,落此為巖。村子以這巖石命名,亦是這深山神話的回響。

As for my choice of filming subject, I’d been raised at Turtle Rock Village by grandma for six years since I was born, it is where I originally belong to. I sadly realize that the villagers here are categorized as the “invisible”, being completely marginalized by the modern world. They are not only deprived from cultural and capital accumulation, but also being physically isolated from the outer world. All they encounter everyday are endless trivial matters, all they speak are meaningless fragmented naggings, and all they dream is the unreachable “out there”. These quotidian dilemma and struggles are without any eventful dramas noticeable to the public media, in other words, the place comes to be an abandoned corner of absence.

What I hope is through this documentary without any preset conditions and stage directions, the audience can directly experience the concrete individual images underlying the poetically extended moments, and to make sense of the thickness of life itself and its general representations. From the angle of animism, I represent the human existence by meticulously delineating the mundane living. For what I endeavor is to extract from the lowest bottom and most ordinary life, the spirituality of pureness and metaphor in the sense of both aesthetics and metaphysics.

This is also the reason why I embrace high proportions of monochromic long takes and scenery shots. Exfoliating from the colorful distractions, the black-and-white long takes deep inside the mountainous areas impose a sense of metaphorical and retrospective romance, dissociating from the time-space confinements. Like the images of fire sparkles and worn-out knives, the primitive and impoverished life does not only suggest suffering, but also being infiltrated with often neglected astonishing natural beauty, and conceived with long forgotten metaphors and myths.

我拍攝的是我在人生最初的六年裏生活過的地方,我的親人們是被徹底邊緣化的“看不見的底層”。他們不僅僅是在文化和經濟上幾乎壹無所有,在物理上也是與世隔絕的。他們面對的是永無止境的幹巴巴的瑣事,說的是不斷重復的支離破碎的廢話,夢想的是那個遙不可及的“外面”。這些瑣碎的困苦和掙紮沒有任何值得現代媒體關註的事件性,這是壹個被遺棄的角落。

我希望通過這個沒有任何預設和導演的紀錄片,讓觀眾直接感知這些個體的生活體驗,在如詩般流動性的瞬間中,領悟生命本身的厚度和其普遍的體現。我從泛靈主義的視角,對庸常生活細致入微的描寫來表現人的一種存在。換句話說,我希望一種純粹的精神性和隱喻性從最凡俗最底層的生活中被提煉出來。

這也是我使用黑白色調長鏡頭和大量空鏡的原因。剝離了彩色的表象,黑白的長鏡頭在深山中更具有某種回歸意義的,抽離整體時空的形而上的詩意。壹團團火苗,壹把把耕刀,貧困且瑣碎的生活不僅僅只有苦難,也同時滲透著被忽略的自然之美,孕育著被遺忘的隱喻和神話。


Using Format