Dialing into tradition

The title, a proverb meaning overcoming many hurdles, is the name of a classic Peking Opera excerpt.

Song's previous works include Tracing Her Shadow, a Golden Goblet Award winner for best film at the 23rd Shanghai International Film Festival in 2020.

The director, born in 1982, was raised in the dormitory of a Peking Opera troupe in Beijing. His grandfather used to play erhu (a two-stringed traditional instrument) and his mother specialized in the performance of huadan (young female role).

It wasn't long before his mother became one of the Peking Opera actresses who tried their hand at disco dancing, dressed in miniskirt.The audience cheered.

Song still remembers the texture of her mom's headwear and the troupe's prop broadswords that he played with, out of curiosity, and has managed to bring the settings, the hue and atmosphere of the theater, and also people's looks and hairstyles of the time, to the short film.

And by shooting with the phone, he was able to set the lens to simulate the visual perspective of the opera performers and shoot the film while moving amid a crowd of actors and actresses on the stage. This creates an alternative expression compared to his former works, while soothing the anxiety of the opera performers in front of the camera, he says.

For Song, cinema and Peking Opera are both about humanity and storytelling. However, the traditional opera, as a form of stage drama, is more abstract in that the performers have to convey charm of the characters with nonphysical acting.