Midi Z, Zhao Liying on the Universal Themes of The Unseen Sister

Taiwanese-Burmese filmmaker Midi Z caused a stir and gained good notices with his 2019 film Nina Wu, which dealt with the exploitation of women in entertainment, and was released in the midst of the global #MeToo movement, a long overdue public reckoning for powerful men who had committed acts of sexual violence and misconduct.

Selected for the main competition at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, Z’s new film, The Unseen Sister, outwardly at least, has similar themes to Nina Wu — that is, the habitual abuse of women in the entertainment industry as well as the trials of women at the margins of society.

Adapted from Zhang Yueran’s book Unseen Sister, the film tells the story of two sisters, one who is born officially as Qiao Yan and the other who takes on the name of Qiao Yan but lives in a twilight world of illegality, under the constant threat of being discovered. After swapping identities at a young age, the sisters grow up to very different lives in two different countries. The real Qiao Yan lives on the fringes of poverty in Myanmar and the assumed Qiao Yan becomes a famed actress in China. Fate, inevitably, brings them back together.

The film stars Zhao Liying (The Legend of Shen Li, The Story of Minglan Legend of Chu Qiao, Legend of Lu Zhen and The Journey of Flower and Wild Bloom), a prominent television actor in China who is making the transition to features. The cast also includes Huang Jue, Xin Zhilei and Chinese rapper Gem.

The Unseen Sister is produced by Shanghai Linmon Pictures, and is part of the company’s push into feature films with international appeal. After playing in Tokyo, the film will screen at the Singapore International Film Festival in December.

During the Tokyo Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Z and Zhao about The Unseen Sister, the challenges of making a mainstream commercial film with arthouse credentials and the universal themes of the feature.

Is The Unseen Sister the first mainstream Chinese film you’ve done?

MIDI Z Yes, that’s correct. It’s the first mainstream film that I’ve done, in comparison to the past ones. This is the most commercial film, in terms of production budget and the production scale. All my earlier films, were a little bit smaller with less people on set, this one, it’s over 300 people on set. Ultimately, the core of the story and the core of the whole production is very Chinese. It’s about Chinese people. It’s about family. It’s about the values that Chinese people value a lot.

Were there any specific challenges working on a bigger scale for you as a director? Did your process change in any way?

MIDI Z I think the most important part [for me as a director] is communication, specifically communication with the actors. Within a story, within a production, the chemistry and the performance of the actors are actually much more important than the story itself, because the actors are the people that brings out the story. And so in the two months, right before production, there was actually a lot of communication between me and the actors, and the actors met very frequently to rehearse and to go through the story together to get the chemistry and to get that story ready for rolling. It is very valuable and that really, really helped me to bring out the story through the performance of the actors.

So in the film, there’s the use of two languages, Mandarin and the Yunnan dialect. Why did you choose to use two different dialects?

MIDI Z It’s because of the story. It’s because of the setting of the character. The character is traveling from Yunnan to Beijing.

For you as an actor, Zhao, do you speak the Yunnan dialect? If not, was that a real challenge to get right?

ZHAO LIYING No I don’t speak it. We spent about a month before production to work on the dialect specifically to go through all of the lines that the script has in the Yunnan dialect, so that we can be more comfortable during production. That’s how we overcame the difficulty working with a different dialect.

As an outsider, is the use of multiple dialects of Mandarin unusual for a mainstream Chinese film?

MIDI Z It’s becoming more and more common now to have a different dialect because there are a lot of different people traveling between different cities in China, a lot more exposure to dialects. The Sichuan dialect, the Guizhou dialect, for example, are becoming more and more common in content, and I think that’s great.

Watching The Unseen Sister, I felt the sensibilities, and perhaps the audience for this film, would be more international, particularly with the themes and ideas the film deals with. Is that fair to say?

MIDI Z Ultimately, this is a very, very Chinese film. And when we think about Chinese nature of the film, there are two different parts to it. The first part is the core of the story itself — the values of the story is very Chinese. It’s about the individual and their family, and how the individuals wants and desires clash with the family’s wants and desires and how it came out to look. And then when we come to the second part of it, which is the outside of the story, which is what we see visually — the landscape, the location. The aesthetics of it, like all the production design, the architecture that we see. There was a lot of snow and it’s a very poetic aesthetic style, a very Chinese style.

And the themes are universal themes. My films are really expressive about people’s lives. In order to speak to the audience, you really have to understand what lives they’re going through. And really this movie is about women and what they’re going through in society, the difficulties that they’re facing and their struggle. Their fight against whatever it is that is suppressing them, their desire and their yearning for freedom and for a better life.

Zhao, regarding your role as Qiao Yan, she is very complex and she’s also a prominent actress like you are in real life. What attracted you to the project? And also did you relate to the fame and industry-related pressures Qiao Yan goes through?

ZHAO LIYING I chose this character and chose this project because I really wanted to challenge myself. What really attracted me to the project was really Midi’s style and Midi’s very unique narrative style of his movies and his stories. And honestly, the character being an actress is really just a setting for the character in the story. And it isn’t about this one character in this one setting. It’s really about the entirety, like the overall story and the structure and style and the narration that really attracted me.

Regarding whether the character was relatable… obviously, the story, it’s very dramatic. Sure I can relate to a certain extent, but of course these are very dramatic experiences that the character is going through. It doesn’t really happen in real life. The overall pressure, the suppression that [Qiao Yan] faces at work, I can definitely relate to that specific thing. There’s a scene where my character is filming a scene in hospital and she’s being stabbed with a needle, that really triggered me.

Midi, The Unseen Sister has some outward similarities with your last film Nina Wu, as there’s an actress as the lead character, she’s exploited by the men around her, and the entertainment industry is portrayed as quite negative. Why have you focused on stories around women being mistreated?

MIDI Z I grew up in a family that is dominated by female. I grew up under the protection of my mom and my sister. They are both wonderful women. My interactions with my family affected my considerations when it came to storytelling and designing characters. This comprehension of my mom and my sister’s lives also affected me when whenever I write and create a female character. In The Unseen Sister, Qiao Yan really expresses this type of woman that is already successful to the standards of our current society, she’s famous, she’s wealthy, and yet she still faces these types of difficulties. This situation can really affect anyone.