Interview: Spring in a Small Town director Li Liuyi

: I am very impressed by director Fei Mu's 1948 take on the short play by Li Tianji. His movie is such an avant-garde piece both in terms of directorial style and artistic sense. There is a hint of poetic quality emanating from every frame and every detail. The story is very simple and lacks dramatic climaxes, but through depicting the daily trivia and ordinary sorrows it tells a bigger picture of our way of life. When I first watched the movie it reminded me of works by Russian playwright [Anton] Chekhov: they surpass time and are still relevant to our contemporary world.

My love for theatre dates back to the 1970s when I was young. I was born into an opera family and I grew up watching numerous shows. The ever-changing nature of a stage thrills me — it has nothing but it has everything. It is simply magical to witness an infinite number of amazing things being brought to life inside a void. Most of the more memorable ones I had watched as a child are yangbanxi [revolutionary opera], including The Legend of the Red Lantern. In 1982, I left my native Chengdu to study at the Central Academy Of Drama and have been based in Beijing ever since.

During the Cultural Revolution, the growth in yangbanxi meant politics were often expressed through artistic creations. The political impact was so intense in China's art scene there was barely room for art any more. Artists — regardless of forms and mediums — ceased to create "art" and many gave in and became tools for propaganda. The rest were also likely to be influenced unconsciously by the ideology the further away from art, self discovery and daily mores they got. Pure drama is all about eliminating that distance and leaning closer, the way it is supposed to, with literature and humanity.