Technical data

Original title: Tu ya de hun shi

Genre: Dramatic

Producer: Wang Quan An

Interpreters: Yu Nan (Tuya), Bater (Bater), Sen Ge (Sen Ge), Zhaya (Zhaya), Peng Hongxiang (Baolier)

Nationality: Chinese

Distribution: Lucky Red Distribution

Year of broadcast: 2007 Origin: China (2006)

 Subject and screenplay: LuWie, Wang Quan An

Photography: (Coloured landscape): Lutz Reitemeier

Music: Mongolian Folk Song

Editing (montage): Wang Quan An

Duration: 96'

Production: Yan Jugang

DVD: Euro 17.99

Notes: Orso d'Oro e Premio della Giuria Ecumenica al 57mo Festival di Berlino (2007)

(Golden bear and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in 57^th festival of Berlin (2007)

The plot

The marriage of Tuya, by Quanan, describes a paradoxical situation in the boundless semi-deserted zone of Chinese Mongolia. Because of the industrial expansion, many shepherds are compelled to give up their nomadic life and to settle near inhabited centres. Out of those who do not want to abandon the pastures there is Tuya, a beautiful and strong woman, who refuses to go far from her land and continues to live tirelessly in the steppes with two children, hundred sheep and her husband Bater, who has remained disabled in his tentative of digging a water well. Being aware of his infirmity, the man,  proposes to divorce in order to offer her wife the possibility of marrying again somebody who could be of help in her hard works. He felt the need of a man in a house with children to be brought up, the flock of sheep to be taken to pasture every day and the solution of the water problem. It is very difficult for a woman to live when the well is 15 kilometres away from the dwelling place and the camel is the only means of transport to reach it.

Tuya does not want to leave the father of her children and, when she falls sick because of the heavy work, with the concreteness typical of a country-woman, she re-considers the proposal: she will marry only the one who is ready to shoulder the assistance of her first husband, because she has no intention of abandoning him. Many men ask to marry her, but there are never-ending problems for Tuya,  

Reflection after viewing the film

With particular accuracy, the film reproduces the life of the inhabitants of internal Mongolia, which the Chinese neo-capitalistic industry is uprooting from the nomad and sheep-breeding life. 

Through an essential narrative structure, the story takes us up to the threshold of an epochal tragedy; the slow rhythms and a sweet-bitter humoristic character narrate the life of a people who, in the name of progress, assists to the upsetting of its own identity. The images like a big wide-opened window, project boundless spaces and arid extensions of indigence beaten by the wind, where meagre human groups go on resisting against situations of extreme poverty. The expressions of faces speak more than words, narrating their isolation and the daily fatigues. The features of the faces, with timeless gestures, fill the scene and involve the spectator in a tormented and suffered metaphor: a feminine drama, which brings to evidence the commitment of saving the traditions, the fatigue of work and survival.  

The courageous and strong Tuya is compelled to divorce by her invalid husband in order to ensure the future of the family. At the beginning of the film, after a brief prologue of her voice outside the field, in the desert passage, we see her arriving with a camel, while spurring a flock of sheep. We do not yet know anything about her, but can read from her face the drama of a woman divided between the past and the present, between fatality and love. Everything is narrated with intense humanity that clashes against the difficult and suffered decision that Tuya and Bater are compelled to take: to carry on their life they must cease to live, they must renounce their past, their love, their bond and their future. Tuya represents the symbolic embodiment of the feminine strength on which this dispersed people live like many more people on earth.

Let us reflect on the words

of the producer  Wang Quan An. <<My mother was born near the locality of this film in the internal Mongolia. This is why I love very much the Mongolian life, the Mongolians and their music. When I came to know that the formidable industrial expansions was turning the pasture fields into desert and that the local administrators had compelled the shepherds to quit their lands, I decided to use the film for a documentation of all those events, before they were completely lost. This particular marriage has been taken from a real local story. The location of this film is the last sheep-breeding field, which was not abandoned by the Mongolian shepherds. The principal actors are more or less local shepherds.

The production of the film met with many difficulties and by the time the film was completed, all the people and the houses shown by the film had disappeared. The proud Mongolians riding horses have now changed into countrymen who live near the city, or ambulant sellers  selling fruit at the corners of the streets. For this reason the Mongolians have become tidy persons like us. This has saddened me much: when I remember those very beautiful Mongolian faces full of joy and compare them with the sadness presented by this film, I feel something like peace in my heart >>.

Gian Filippo Belardo of the L’Osservatore Romano: <<Strongly rooted in the land where it was taken, Mongolia, this Chinese film assumes a universal valence for its candid  expression  and some sequences that reach the vertex of poetry: a hymn to family affections, a clash between tradition and modernity, an exaltation of the dignity and strength of the woman in a society dominated by men are the cardinal points of the work. The producer has taken to the video a true story located in a Country, where the transformation from sheep-breeding into industrialisation is quite rapid; a story that acquires the relevance of the last document of an extinguishing archaic society>>.

Pastoral use

It is not the first time that the dissident producer Wang Quan An  offers us a clear and intense manifesto on the primitive groupings in the Mongolian hills. This Film, of Chinese production, but of Mongolian environment, brings to evidence a reality made up of things and behaviours which could be found ridiculous  and out of common logic to the eyes of an inattentive spectator. A dramatic normality, narrated under the form of a metaphor, accompanies us through the uses and customs of a civilisation, but also through the inexorable destruction of an epoch. In the contemporary Mongolia, the industrial development goes on inexorably dragging away activities bound to the past, such as nomadic life and sheep-breeding, and pushing people to the anonymous peripheries of cities. The marriage of Tuya describes the fatigue of mankind, but it offers also hints of confrontation  between tradition and modernity: a hard, clear, linear and fascinating denunciation. Tuya is a woman who lives in a society dominated by the absolute authority of man; she has to struggle in this society and with this authority to defend her own dignity and that of her husband. She does it remaining attached to her land, to the deep values of her people; to external poverty she opposes her interior richness, which becomes the very heart of the film. The producer chooses the narrative form of the fable to describe this richness and to tell us about the strength of this woman before the adversities of life, but also the lasting struggle against avarice and the thirst for dominion. Her tears look like a final surrender, but they are the key consenting us to feel her close, so close as to share her sorrow and fatigue. They are the tears of every woman who struggles in order to live and to love

Thematic: Family, marriage –couple; Political-society

Evaluation of the CNVE: acceptable/problematic/debates

The film in the printing press

<<The marriage of Tuya gives the theme for the research of a new form of family conviviality made necessary by the needs of life, this time not of the urban life, but of the countryside-life in the midst of the Internal Mongolian desert (the Chinese part of Mongolia). It is there that the young shepherd Tuya lives with her disabled husband and two children. She struggles daily for the survival of her tiny family nucleus. The marriage of Tuya looks like a slow down space. with tranquil and spacious images. Wan Quan’an makes us to journey with Tuya through the sublime country of Mongolia where the economic boom has not yet reached. Fighting day after day for life, seems to be far from the typical doubts, reflections and desires of the “global citizens”. Crossing enormous spaces with different means of transport (on foot, camel, horse, car, truck), this woman represents a vital more than an individualistic principle, n other words, the human condition in itself>>. (Anne Preckel, www.schermaglie.it, 24^th June  2007). <<In the vast Chinese cinematography (though it still recluses festival circuits), the marriage of Tuya emerges as an authentic jewel. Its ambition is that of narrating a human event, safe from easy sentimentalisms, ethnographic fascinations and moralising intentions. Tuya is a feminine memorable and emblematic personage of the actual condition at more than one latitude of our old world. Animated by unshakeable strength and determination, she is the only person to have at heart the destiny of her family, in an absent masculine universe, mean and at times also coward. Thus, the deep solitude of Tuya is even more evident, as well as her independence. There is no need of underlining the political value of a cinema like this in a country where the birth of a baby girl is seen as a misadventure and the situation of the woman is not at its

best.>> (Mauro Corso, www.filmup.com). <<Tuya, is the new portrait of a courageous woman, very much classic in its form, but true and real. “The Marriage of Tuya narrates a surprising feminine story of strength and resistance. A human event narrated with honesty and sincerity, catching from the face of a young woman the suffering of her condition, together with the desire of struggling and of love for her family; the very beautiful  Nan Yu wears the role of a model mother to perfection and imposes herself on the scene for the expression of her eyes and her presence. In narrating the heroic and common gestures of a mother, the Chinese producer takes to the video also the difficult political situation of the woman in a country heavily masculine, where the rights of women are still quite far from being recognised as such. >> (Antonio Fantasia, www. cinelab.it).

Courtesy of Teresa Braccio
Via Castro Pretorio, 16 – 00186 Roma