User:Peanutdoll/Li Yu (director)

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Early life and career development

After graduating from college, Li Yu worked as a TV anchor in Shandong, China.

Her career as a host brought her a lot of income, but she didn't think it was what she was after, so she moved to Beijing and gradually developed into a documentary director. In her spare time, she has been writing scripts and novels, which laid the foundation for her later film production.

The single parent family is the most common setting in Li Yu's films, it has a lot to do with her personal experience. The absence of men in the family changes women's social identity. Li Yu understands women's troubles and the discomfort and even pain brought by identity transformation to her family and herself, so she always shows women's power in her films, but also reflects the contradictions and sufferings experienced by women in the background of that era.

Directorial career

In Li Yu's film Fish and Elephant, she truly conveys to us the cruel reality and oppressive human relationships.

Fish and Elephant is the first Chinese feature film about lesbian relationships in a heterosexual social and cultural environment.

With this film, the director hopes to explore how the lesbian community identifies and reconciles their identities and relationships within the heterosexual system. It was also a risky attempt to expose the "coercive mechanism of heterosexuality" in Chinese society at the time.

Since she has not received any professional training in directing, her expression is more direct and real, as if she is talking to the audience and expressing her heart. Therefore, in her early works, the social environment always seems to be a ruthless accomplice, which leads to the occurrence of many female tragedies.

According to Li Yu, the story of the 2007 film "Lost in Beijing" was discussed by her and her producer, Mr. Li Fang, over coffee at a street-side coffee stand during the screening of her film "Dam Street" at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005.

They looked at the bustling Toronto and thought of Beijing, the city where they live, and wanted to tell a story about Beijing.

In China's previous history, divorce did not occur very often. However, with the independence of women's thought, more and more men in the society are cheating, which leads women to explore a new social identity.

In 2018, director Li Yu made film Tiger Robbers (Chinese title: 阳光劫匪), an absurd and sad story about people who suffered and dealt with the pain of loss, and said it took a lot of effort and time to make and the post-production process was complicated and difficult. The film will be released in China in 2021.

Awards

2016-Golden Sheep Award Macao International Film Festival Best Screenplay Award Everything Grows Award

2015-The 11th Sino-US Film Festival Sino-US Talent Exchange Outstanding Chinese Young Director Award

Personal life

Li Yu admits that many of her early pictures were given to herself, and that her childhood was not happy. At the age of 6, she could often hear her parents fighting, which was a common day for her. When she was 16, her mother told her of her parents' divorce, which was painful and surprising. When she was in the fourth grade of primary school, Li Yu painted a story about a white rabbit looking for a lover, which was apparently precocious and unnatural to the teacher. In the story, the little white rabbit is a girl who experiences a series of absurd things on her way to find a lover and is even raped by a big bad Wolf. The teacher was very angry and punished her for it.

At the age of 21, Li Yu wrote a script, describing a 16-year-old girl with a lot of men in the story, but these men are actually cheating on her, but the girl is very naive life in the fairy tale.

Li Yu's thinking is very precocious, she has been exposed to the rules of sexual relations and the adult world too early, so she sympathizes with the sufferings of many women, and has always wanted to do something for them.

Because she was born very sensitive and delicate, she was also very concerned about all kinds of new things in the outside world, which also provided a lot of help for her early career as an anchor.

In daily life, Li Yu is also a media person who always pays attention to women's issues and speaks for women. On Weibo, China's social media platform similar to Twitter, she often posts news reports about domestic violence and unequal treatment of women, and expresses her own opinions. She always pays attention to the realistic plight of Chinese women, and presents these in her works to arouse more audience's attention and thinking.