ABOUT 2,000 students are gathered in the playground of No 108 School in Changchun, Jilin province, solemnly listening to the national anthem blaring from a speaker. It looks like any flag-raising ceremony conducted in mainland schools every week, but a camera rolling down one side of the square means this one is different.
A movie is being shot, and despite the subzero temperatures and biting wind, most students seem happy to forgo the day's classes to serve as extras. Once a scene is wrapped up, they break into small groups to chat about the film and its director. But the discussion is very different among those extras who are students at Changchun Public Relations School. 'It's so hard to shoot a film. We've been acting a whole morning. [If it was like the other day], we'd have finished the whole script by now,' says one. 'You're right ... It's much more complicated than our impromptu project,' says another.
Such comparisons are inevitable when the students were actors in the real-life drama on which the film is based. They had enacted the same scene at their school seven months earlier to fulfil a dying seven-year-old's wish. Zhu Xinyue, who used to raise the flag at her primary school, was already blinded by her brain tumour, but hoped to attend the ceremony at Tiananmen Square. When her family appealed for help to fulfil this dream, 2,000 people stepped forward - by having Xinyue believe she'd made it to the capital since she was unfit to travel. While they didn't have a detailed script, the volunteers worked out a 'route', on which they would play bus conductors, commuters and tourists from the provinces. Xinyue was completely taken in.
The heart-warming gesture inspired Hong Kong director Allun Lam Wai-lun (Another Meltdown, 1999) to turn it into a movie, A Chinese Fairy Tale. But with the patriotic symbolism of Xinyue's wish, the project is invariably labelled as Hong Kong's first foray into making so-called mainstream ideology movies - a euphemism for propaganda films.
Lam found the shoot in Changchun a challenge. Because daylight hours are short, the crew had to start at 6am to make the most of the sunshine, and the bitter cold slowed filming even further.
'The whole story unfolds over just seven days, from the first day when the girl's father calls a local newspaper for help, to the last day when the ceremony is enacted,' says Lam. 'I asked the publisher, 'how did you do it in seven days when I have to prepare for two months for a film? What preparations did you make? How did you persuade so many students to pretend that they were going to Beijing?' But there were no plans; many things were just serendipity.'