Abandoning the Mundane: Ran Li’s Tender 'Till Love Do Us Part’ Premieres at the 38th Warsaw Film Fest
By Jared Feldschreiber
For nuanced filmmaker Ran Li, various cultures are interwoven seamlessly within her tender film, ‘Till Love Do Us Part’. The story focuses on a college lecturer who falls madly in love with a theatre director while on a work trip. The hitch is that the 30-year-old already has a fiancé back home in what can be best perceived as a decent middle class life in China. The 110-minute film made its debut at this year’s Warsaw Film Festival.
The uncertainty motif permeates throughout Li’s film, and this theme is clearly an intentional one. Uncertainty fits the protagonist’s main lot as an urban planner and lecturer as her innate sensibilities perhaps juxtaposes with the impulses of a freethinking theatre director. Her reawakening, though, makes for a most interesting balance of self discovery and female interiority.
“I have a female friend who is a lecturer and teaches urban planning at a top Chinese university. She was the inspiration for the character, Shu,’’ says Li. “Urban planning, like any type of planning, deals with uncertainty. Life is full of planning and calculation, but life is also spontaneous and ever-changing. The only thing that wouldn’t change is probably ‘change’ itself — which we all learn to embrace in the end.”
The lead actress is played by up-and-coming actress, Liang Cuishan, who “has very little acting experience in films prior to the shooting [of this picture],” adds Li. “She responded to my casting call and impressed me in the audition. I needed a fresh face to give life to this character. She blends in the mainstream society humbly. When she gradually becomes her own person during her love encounter, it touches us.” Till Love Do Us Part took part in the “1–2 Competition” at this year’s Warsaw Film Festival, which featured various categories — and genres — over its ten days of movies.
Li, who was born in Beijing, earned her law degree from Tsinghua University. She lived and worked in law in Europe before attending Prague Film School. Leading up to her feature film’s debut, Li’s short films were selected in more than sixty international film festivals and won over twenty awards. These festivals included SXSW, Shanghai International Film Festival, Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival amongst others. Till Love Do Us Part was selected in various financing forums, including the Shanghai International Film Festival Film Market, Film London PFM New Talent Program, Udine Far East Film Festival Focus Asian Project Market and others.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/700724300
Like the film’s director, the protagonist Shu has a love of architecture. Till Love Do Us Partfeatures an array of beautiful landscapes throughout Prague. “Basically architecture’s my hobby. I had architecture classes back in university. Theatre, also, has been my passion. In school, I directed plays and we did the classical ones, like Tennessee Williams, and all of the Russian playwrights. In Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, [for instance], I was the leading actress in it. I played in a lot of them,” says Li.
So how much of Till Love Do Us Part autobiographical?
“This is interesting because I know a Slovak who is also a theatre director,” responds Li. “A lot of the events in the film had happened to him. I used to work with him as I was his videographer when he worked in information technology. He used to do this side job as a coder to support his theatre performances. He didn’t make money from theatre but he put his whole heart into it, and he was inspiring.”
Till Love Do Us Part can best be portrayed as a sociological love story that explores a Chinese woman’s struggles with societal expectations. The film’s heady and deeply felt female protagonist embarks on a journey to find love and her own self-worth. The film also deftly balances different values and customs — from eastern and western perspectives. As a result, the shoot was split up between Beijing and Prague over thirty-nine days.
“We managed to make everything according to plan,” says co-producer Michal Sikora. “One of the challenges was to bring a crew from China to Czech Republic. It would have not been possible without the support of the Czech Film Commission and the exemption granted by the Ministry of Culture. It was a small miracle.” Sikora also helped with some of the casting work while the crew was in Prague. Li’s company, Bunnylake Production, together with Attention Productions and Lonely Production, produced the film. All of the initial shooting scenes took place first in China, and lasted for seventeen days. The plan was to shoot throughout the summer of 2020 “but it it took us 2.5 months to get all of our visa work done. So, when we got there, it was already October and it was cold,” says Li.
“A British actor recommended me for the audition for this film,” adds Aaron Wan, one of the film’s co-stars. “[Playing the part of a Chinese businessman], I asked a few Mandarin-speaking actresses to help me prepare for my role. The rehearsal process was intense. As many directors are clever, I have great respect for Ran because she follows her heart and does not bow to being [manipulated by the constraints] of money.”
Li’s gumption brought her from graduating at the top law school in China to working as a lawyer in Europe. But her destiny lay in film directing. “In 2016, I graduated from Prague Film School and returned to Beijing and started this new chapter in my life. All of my friends were living a stable and comfortable middle-class life. Meanwhile, an impulse to break free from the shackles of ordinary life [had already brewed in my mind]. My story was inspired by this reality.”
The second half of Till Love Do Us Part brings Shu to her native country where she is bound to the very strict societal mores she sought to shed while experiencing self-fulfillment and love while in Prague. “It is a turning point,” says Li. “For Shu, being in China [means] being unaware of developing choices. It is when she is in Europe that she learns what love feels like and it’s another side of the same coin. There is a chance as the door opens up for her, but the door also closes because of disappointments. Life has to go on — but life back in China is different because she’s different.” Li, a cinematic craftswoman with literary sensibilities, told her cinematographer, Hu Chen, that she wanted the camera to be “invisible” so that “the audience can focus on character and story.”
The post-production work for Till Love Do Us Part took a year to do before the film made its debut in large crowds at the main theater halls of Warsaw’s Multikino complex.
Contact Information: Ran Li (Bunnylake Production) ranli1220@hotmail.com
First two photos via Bunnylake Production
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