In search of a silver lining
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E-mail China Daily, December 26, 2019
Feng was moved when Zhang opened up about his feelings for his late wife, especially as he had just happened to catch iconic Japanese actor Ken Takakura's last film Dearest-a story about a retired prison warden who fulfills his dead wife's last wish-which also tugged his heartstrings.
All these elements helped give rise to Only Cloud Knows, his latest movie currently on release in China, New Zealand, Australia, North America and the United Kingdom.
Penned by novelist-turned-scriptwriter Zhang Ling, whose 2009 novel Aftershock was adapted by Feng into a disaster flick of the same name in 2010, Only Cloud Knows by contrast has a narrative that unfolds at a much slower pace.
Set principally in picturesque New Zealand, the 132-minute film follows the story of a Chinese expatriate who travels over 15,000 kilometers to fulfill his late wife's wishes, returning some of her ashes to her hometown in China and scattering more into the sea at a whale-watching spot near in New Zealand.
Through a series of flashbacks, the story unfolds how the couple fell in love when they rented separate rooms in a Chinese woman's house in Auckland, and later, their painstaking efforts in setting up their Chinese restaurant in the small town of Clyde in southern New Zealand.
Huang, 34, stars as the grieving husband, while 27-year-old actress Yang Caiyu plays his wife. The new movie marks their reunion after appearing as the main characters in Youth.
Yang, whose father died of cancer two years ago, recalls that she could appreciate the sentimental tone of the movie from her own parents' love story.
"My mother's situation is much like the husband's in the film. They have both been left in the sorrow of loneliness halfway along life's path," Yang explains.
Both of the stars spent a long time preparing for their roles in order to convey the bittersweet romance and the characters' sense of isolation and loneliness as expatriates.
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