How Is Your Fish Today?
Tues 11 Dec 2007 10pm
Documentary blends with fiction as a writer imagines a journey to a mystical place at the northernmost point of China.
This documentary is part of the China Rising season.
The screenwriter
Rao Hui, a single thirty-something screenwriter who lives in Beijing, is hired to write a Hollywood-style blockbuster. When the hastily prepared draft – based on The Fugitive – is rejected, he begins a much more personal rewrite, in which his own longing to escape from his urban life becomes the reality of his fictional main character Lin Hao, a young man who is on the run after killing his lover.
How Is Your Fish Today starts like a documentary – filmmaker Xiaolu Guo interviews passengers and train staff on the train to Mohe, a village at the frozen, northernmost point of China. The guard has never actually been there – the village of Mohe is 80 miles beyond the train stop. "Once they had 20 hours of sunlight in a day," says the chef in the restaurant car, before rushing to take his wok off the heat. "It must be a nice place," says a woman traveller. Why? "That's how I imagine it."
The two narratives
Then it shifts to Beijing, where writer Lin Hao (who plays himself) introduces both his own story – starting with the commission for the big script – and the fictional one of Lin Hao's escape to Mohe.
Throughout the film the two narratives run simultaneously, but as Rao Hui becomes inevitably closer to his fictional hero, he finds himself on the same train to Mohe – where fiction and reality are indistinguishable – and finds his main character lying face down in the snow.
