Qiu Jiongjiong Serves Up Four Eras of Feasting in Tokyo Competition

Painter-turned-filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong is competing at the Tokyo International Film Festival with "Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting," a film built entirely around meals. The Chinese artist tells Variety he began shaping it during the pandemic, when people felt an urgent desire to gather around a table again. That longing became the screenplay.

The film links four eras through food, each chapter approaching the pleasure of eating — and its meaning — through its own fantastical vocabulary. An opening title card presents "Fuxi" as a phrase evoking both the delight of food and the act of eating itself.

Who plays whom?

Taiwanese star Lee Kang-sheng, the longtime lead of Tsai Ming-liang's films, plays two elderly women from different eras, including a dying grandmother in the prehistoric chapter. The entire film is spoken in the Leshan dialect of Sichuan province.

"This may be the film with the most dialogue I've ever had, but I couldn't understand a word of it," Lee says.

Qiu cast him for a reason. "I was drawn to the mysterious quality about him, which felt perfectly suited to a character from ancient times," the director says. "That gave me the idea of asking him to play a woman."

Lee worked with several dialect coaches. So did Lee Hong-chi, who plays Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo. "I only found out I was playing Su Dongpo when I got the script," he says. "The dialect was a challenge for me, too, but I really wanted to be part of the film because of its nonrealistic aesthetic and the world Qiu had created."

What changed from 'A New Old Play'?

Qiu's previous feature, "A New Old Play," traced one individual's personal history. "Fuxi" instead unfolds across four eras in four short stories, using each chapter's central meal to approach questions of life and death.

"Through the individual lives of the characters, I wanted to explore a kind of relativity specific to this film — the relationship between the large and the small, or between a meal and the sun and the moon," Qiu says.

It was also his first time directing professional actors, an experience he says has broadened his creative ambitions. His next project has no subject or medium yet.

Where can you see more?

His solo exhibition, "Qiu Jiongjiong: Fuxi: A Feast for the Universe," runs at Chengdu's A4 Art Museum through Jan. 31. Built around three Sichuan-style banquets, it uses painting, video and installation to explore the region's culture and its ideas about life and death.

On recent viewing: Qiu singles out Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," fascinated by its reconstruction of history. Lee watched Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" for the first time after Tsai and actor Chang Chen recommended it. "I was surprised that such a brilliant film could have been made so long ago," he says.

Lee has just wrapped Argentine director Iván Fund's science-fiction film "Bodies of Summer." Whether playing a gangster or an old woman, he says, "I want to bring my own version of Lee Kang-sheng to the role." He admits he still stops for any Jason Statham film on television; an action or martial-arts picture, he suggests, could break his familiar screen image. Tokyo's jury will weigh in first.