Yao Jinfei, a mainland Chinese actor, graduated from the Chinese Academy of Opera, and has played roles in a number of films and TV dramas, including "The Good Times of the Daughter-in-Law".
Realizing his father's dream of acting
Yao Jinfei said that the idea of filming "My Father" came after he learned that his father suddenly developed lung cancer. When he learned the news, his mind was blown. In his mind, although his father's body is slightly thin, but healthy and strong, usually rarely sick. When Yao Jinfei rushed back to Qingdao, in the hospital to see his father lying in bed, his heart was stabbed. Always optimistic humor, hale and hearty father, at this moment has been tortured by the disease dying.
Just a month after his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Yao Jinfei quietly brought his father to Beijing, so that he could experience the life of this bustling metropolis as much as possible. Yao Jinfei took his father to the arcade to play video games, went to the pool hall to play billiards, accompanied him on the subway, and walked around Beijing. He also went to Tiananmen Square with his father to watch the flag-raising ceremony. These ordinary experiences in daily life were the first for his father, but perhaps also the last.
One night, Yao Jinfei, who was filming a movie in the suburbs, suddenly received a call from his girlfriend saying that his father had vomited blood. In order to make up for the regret of not caring enough for his father because of his work over the years, Yao Jinfei decided to make a movie for his father to fulfill his dream of acting.
Yao Jinfei knows that his father has always been fond of Peking Opera and loves to perform, and his biggest wish is to act in a movie. This is also one of the important reasons why his father wanted to send him to the Academy of Opera. Yao Jinfei decided to let his father be the protagonist of the movie for once, and at the same time let the movie record the last time of his life.
He wrote the 30,000-word script in just three days. Yao Jinfei wrote the movie while reminiscing about the good times he had with his father since he was a child. When he got emotional, he couldn't help but cry. Yao Jinfei decided to name the movie "My Father and I".
It's not easy to make a movie
After the script was written in early December 2010, the biggest problem Yao Jinfei had to face was money! His father's hospitalization had already cost him all his savings, and he still needed a huge sum of money for treatment.
Yao Jinfei accompanied his father to the doctor in Qingdao, and occasionally came to a friend's theater cameo, as much as possible for his father to earn some life-saving money. For Yao Jinfei, who usually spends a lot of money, he now really appreciates the importance of money. Sometimes in order to save money, he does not eat breakfast, and so the afternoon two or three o'clock in the afternoon is too hungry to eat a few buns accompanied by plain water to fill up the hunger.
Besides the financial pressure, the problems of actors, filming equipment, scenes, crews, and post-production also torment Yao Jinfei. As a professional actor, Yao Jinfei understands that making a movie is a systematic project that requires the coordination and cooperation of people from various professions and departments before it can finally succeed. At that time, he had nothing but a script. Later on, he met a kind-hearted enterprise boss on the Internet and got a Canon video camera as a filming tool.
There's another problem that Yao Jinfei has had to deal with, and that's the skepticism of the outside world. When some people heard that Yao Jinfei was going to make a movie for his cancer-stricken father, they questioned his self-hype. Especially when Yao Jinfei's story of making a movie for his terminally ill father was widely reported by the news media, this kind of questioning was pushed to the peak.
Yao Jinfei is very relaxed about all the questions from the outside world. He feels that since he has chosen to do something extraordinary, he has to bear the pressure of "extraordinary".
Perseverance
Once in a while, a friend who works as a host for Qingdao TV found out about this and wanted to do a program for the father and son, but Yao Jinfei refused. But Yao Jinfei refused.
He didn't want to make his father's movie a "hype" because he was afraid it would hurt him unnecessarily. But as the filming of the movie encountered more and more difficulties, coupled with the deterioration of his father's condition, he gradually realized that he could not complete it by himself. Yao Jinfei realizes that he can no longer work alone and must seek help from the community.
One week after the program was broadcast on Qingdao TV, CCTV's "****The Same Concern" program also aired the story of Yao Jinfei and his father. Then Beijing TV's "Very Up" and other online media reported on the story. Yao Jinfei's story of making a movie for his terminally ill father became a sensational news for a while.
Just when Yao Jinfei was at his wits' end, he was approached by a medical technology organization in Beijing, which offered him financial support to complete the film and promised to give his father free treatment.
On May 10, 2011, Yao Jinfei held a press conference in Beijing, announcing the start of the filming of My Father. The title of the film was changed from "My Father and I" to "My Father," and the script was massively revised, with a lot of scenes from the 1980s deleted, because the existing funds and personnel simply couldn't complete the filming tasks in the original script. Yao Jinfei also used only four days to make all the preparations, including the preparation of the scene, recruiting actors, building the crew ...... In Yao Jinfei's words, "It's a race with life."
"If there is no help from these ordinary people, I think even if I'm alone again, it's impossible to stick around," Yao Jinfei said emotionally, "There are college students, never met the netizens, free to provide venues for the restaurant owner, and some of the circle of friends rushed to the news. ...... These people are all free to come over to help, hungry with us to eat boxed lunches, and sometimes even to subsidize the cost of transportation. In particular, there is an older woman from Langfang, specifically called me several times to show my support, and finally had to donate the 10,000 yuan he had saved from scrimping and saving to me, saying that it was in place of his own son for the world's parents to do a filial piety ......"
The final gift
At the end of 2011, the filming of "My Father" was finally completed. In addition to editing, audio, color grading and other things that need to be handled by professionals, everything else that can be done on your own, as long as you can do it yourself, is done by Yao Jinfei's own fumbling. All the subtitles in the movie are added by Yao Jinfei word by word.
Originally, Yao Jinfei was going to give his father a decent premiere at the movie theater, even if the occasion was not so grand, at least he could let his father feel the feeling of being the protagonist of a movie. Unfortunately, Yao Jinfei did not fulfill his father's wish.
In May 2012, after the movie was finished, his father proposed to go back to his hometown in Linyi. At this time, Yao Jinfei suddenly had a new idea, since you can not do the premiere in the cinema, then in front of the folks to do an open-air movie premiere. The open-air square stage was his father's favorite place when he was young, and it would be more meaningful to hold his own movie premiere there.
On June 17, 2012, "My Father" premiered on Youku.com, with more than 100,000 hits on the same day, and many netizens were moved to tears, reprinting or posting comments to express their blessings and respect for Yao's father and son.
During the filming of the movie, Yao's father's cancer had spread to his right and left lungs and lymph, and at one point doctors predicted that his father's life would last no more than five months at most. But for the sake of this movie, Yao's father pulled through. Yao's father also created a miracle of life because of this movie.
Maybe we love our parents as much as Yao Jinfei does, but we are constrained by all sorts of reasons to keep this love deep in our hearts, waiting for the right time or way to express it. But Yao Jinfei used his story to tell us: love, can not wait, because wait until the end of the perhaps that a period will become a lifelong regret.
Editing/Feng Lan icarusfeng@126.com