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Treasure, Orientation and the Ancestors

Gui Shuzhong

Release year: 2021

Run time: 83 mins

Film type: Documentary

Synopsis

The Four-Day Taiping Qing Jiao is celebrated from the second to the fifth day of the ninth month of the Chinese lunar calendar each year in the Laifang village, West Fujian. The ritual includes blessings, sacrifice ancestors, divination, exorcism, and many other processes. The climax of those is the Bai-wu-fang ritual on the fifth day of the ninth Lunar month. Lai lineage in the village performed this ritual also to sacrifice their ancestors. Before the traditional stage , villages put tables in five directions(East, West, South, North and Middle), setting on the heirlooms of all ethnic groups on the tables, to show their wealth and power.This film records the whole process of this festival, interpreting the meanings of all rituals, especially how the field expresses the Wu-Ying Army, Feng-shui and other symbolic symbols through treasures, Taoist beliefs and ancestor faith in this Hakka village.

 

Director biography

Original named Ning Yuanguai, Gui is a poet and independent documentary director. He was born in 1967 in Ninghua County, a mountainous Hakka area in the northwest of Fujian Province. Gui has finished four documentaries about local Hakka folk culture: Yukou Paper, Old Genealogy, Chronicles of Hulling Rice, and Revive. He has also directed several short films, including Wugong Sutra and The Ballad of Spring.