[2012.06.18] 1942'S SHOCKING TRAILER IS UNVEILED

courtesy of on.cc

courtesy of mingpao.com

courtesy of takungpao.com

Feng Xiaogang after 18 year of brewing, 9 months of planning and 5 months of difficult production made the 210 million RMB Huayi Brothers Chinese film epci 1942, which held a press conference in Shanghai on the 17th.  Director Feng Xiaogang, screen writer Liu Zhenyun, Huayi chair Wang Zhonglei led stars Xu Fan, Zhang Hanyu, Fan Wei, Zhang Mi, Li Qian in a group appearance to announce the 1942 trailer and two posters.  This was the film's first public decoding of its confidential image and officially announced that it will bring the audience back to the turbulent 1942.

Feng Xiaogang said that the 1942 theme is human.  In the trailer "human" in the film appeared.  The four stories that connected them also surfaced.  When the trailer began, Chiang Kai-Shek (Chen Daoming) asked
the Henan province chair Li Peiji (Li Xuejian) about the death toll from the famine.  "The government estimates 1,062."  "Actual?"  Li Peiji's expression of about to speak and stopped began the entire trailer.  Later, the characters appeared in rags on the screen as they walked in a snowstorm.  They represented the ordinary famine refugee.  An Ximen (Zhang Hanyu) was a faithful Catholic missionary.  When he witnessed the tragic escape from the famine he could only helplessly question the priest (Tim Robbins), "Does God know what is happening here?"; Time magazine's American journalist (Adrien Brody) was covering the famine with a camera lightly said, "I saw a dog eating a man".  The shock of dialogue continued the usual specialty of Feng Xiaogang films.

Four different groups of characters, four different stories, were like four different divides of 1942.  Then "a forgotten history, a fact that must be faced." was displayed, which was also director Feng Xiaogang's initial motivation of the creation.  "Film cannot bring these 3 million people back to life, but perhaps it will be able to make their deaths valuable."

In the 75 second trailer, the most memorable was the tragic image of the old and the young on the run from the famine.  During the entire film's five month production, over 2,000 people in a sea of refugees took over 3 months to shoot.  Wang Zhonglei said about the investment scale, "In pursuit of the realistic effect in the film, we went from the earliest 30 million to its seven fold.  Finally the investment was 210 million RMB."