The Yellow River estuary features in the music documentary,
The River in Me. [Photo provided to China Daily]
A documentary on singer Su Yang's musical inspiration will be in Chinese cinemas soon, Chen Nan reports.
As a kid growing up in Yinchuan, Northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region, Su Yang recalls local people singing "infectious" folk songs as they worked on farms there.
It wasn't until adulthood, however, after Su founded his own band, influenced by rock, that he discovered his interest in Ningxia's folk and traditional music.
Since 2003, the 50-year-old singer-songwriter, who picked up music at the age of 16, has been traveling around Northwest China collecting folk material from local artists. In 2006, he released his debut album, Able and Virtuous, which soon gained him a fan base with its combination of folk music and rock.
Four years later, he released his second album, Like A Grass, which, like his debut album, features elements of Chinese folk. One of the songs Su performs is a traditional hua'er, a type of folk singing from the country's northwest. Titled The Night Journey, the song tells the story of a man's secret date with the woman of his dreams.
Singer-songwriter Su Yang has been traveling around Northwest China collecting folk material from local artists. [Photo provided to China Daily]
In 2016, Su and a team of filmmakers visited four folk artists in different locations, who have influenced his music, and shot the documentary, The River in Me, which is set to be released in Chinese cinemas on June 18. The film was screened during this year's Cannes Film Festival on May 18. As the music director of the documentary, Su is also the narrator who links the four people together.
The four folk artists are Ma Fengshan, who lives in Gu'an county, Ningxia, and sings hua'er songs; Wei Zongfu, who lives in a mountainous area of Huanxian county, Gansu province, and is a shadow puppetry master; Zhang Jinlai from Yinchuan who performs Qinqiang Opera, an art form featuring high-pitched sounds; and Liu Shikai, a storyteller from Yanchi county, Ningxia.
Besides performing as folk artists, the four also work as farmers to make a living.
"I've known them for more than 10 years," says Su, who was born in Wenling, a coastal city in East China's Zhejiang province, and moved to Yinchuan with his parents at the age of 7.
Folk artist Zhang Jinlai (left) from Yinchuan performs Qinqiang Opera. [Photo provided to China Daily]
"They learned their art forms from the older generation and are still performing in remote villages. The art forms, both sounds and folk stories, were born out of local daily life and connect with everything such as the weather, landscape, dialects and food.
"They are not famous or wealthy. But they are keeping the great art traditions alive," Su adds.
He says that when he realized Western rock music "wasn't enough" to convey his thoughts, Chinese folk arts showed him the way.
Three young film directors condensed the 1,600 hours of footage shot over 2016-18 into the documentary of 98 minutes.
Ke Yongquan, 30, who was born and raised in Wuchuan, Guangdong province, is one of them. He had not visited Northwest China before shooting the documentary.
"We worked on the post-production for a whole year," Ke says. "While shooting the documentary, we lived with the folk artists. They live differently from people in bigger cities. Now, I miss them and our days together, especially near the Yellow River."
Wei Zongfu from Huanxian county, Gansu province, is a shadow puppetry master featured in the documentary. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Ke, who has worked in Beijing and Shanghai, says before filming, he had not listened to Su's music much but was taken by Su's interactions with the folk artists through music.
"The shooting opened a new vision for me to review myself and my life. Young people leave their hometowns to seek a better life in bigger cities. It's sad to see old arts dying," Ke says. "I hope the audience will think about their hometowns (when they watch the film)."
The documentary is part of the Yellow River Runs Forth project, which Su launched in 2016 with the aim of showcasing the sounds and visual material he has gathered over the past two decades in Northwest China. He also created paintings during his visits, which he uses as multimedia material during his concerts.
Su says he wants the audience to watch the documentary and learn more about the people and art traditions of the region. Making money from it is not his goal, he adds.
