{"id":21587,"date":"2016-07-26T02:05:13","date_gmt":"2016-07-26T06:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=21587"},"modified":"2016-07-26T02:27:03","modified_gmt":"2016-07-26T06:27:03","slug":"zinnia-flower-2015-new-york-asian-film-festival-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/26\/zinnia-flower-2015-new-york-asian-film-festival-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Zinnia Flower (2015) [New York Asian Film Festival 2016]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ZinniaFlower\"<\/a>Director Tom Lin made the Taiwanese “Zinnia Flower” following the death of his wife in 2012 as part of his grieving process.\u00a0 The film follows Ming who lost her fianc\u00e9 and Wei who lost his wife and unborn child both in a major car accident.\u00a0 Their loves ones get Buddhist funerals in which the departed\u2019s loves ones come to the temple every 7 days for 49 days and are supposed to let go at the end of the grieving period of 100 days.\u00a0 Ming and Wei\u2019s paths cross a few times during this process but each goes through their grief their own way.<\/p>\n

The film is co-written by its director Tom Lin and writer Wei-Jan Liu.\u00a0 They craft a highly personal film about grieving, letting go, moving on, and remembering.\u00a0 Lin puts all of his feelings and hope in this film which is filled with sadness and love.\u00a0 The two mourners the story follows are complex and layered characters, each showing two very different ways of grieving with the victims\u2019 families each taking different approaches to how to include them in the funeral process.\u00a0 The film explores many angles to grief, none of them being better or worse than the other.\u00a0 It also never judges or becomes schmaltzy; it\u2019s a good study in its subject.\u00a0 The director\u2019s closeness to the subject, the fact that he has clearly battled with this, shows throughout the film.\u00a0 He works with a hard subject delicately and gets his audience to share in the worse experience (most likely worse) of his life.<\/p>\n

With a subject so close to his heart, the casting of the characters he created is so important.\u00a0 The actors needed to be perfect for their parts.\u00a0 In the part of Ming, the young woman who lost her fianc\u00e9 in the accident, Karena Lam offers a subdued performance that hits all the right notes.\u00a0 One of her scenes in particular should have every eye watching tearing up.\u00a0 Her character goes through the grieving process without much support but how she decides to go through it on her own shows strength and courage.\u00a0 She not only shows that her character is sad and mad, but you can also see the moment when she takes her life in her own hands, the moment her sadness changes , all of this through the actress\u2019 soft, yet strong performance.\u00a0 In the part of Wei, actor Shih Chintlang, a guitarist from the band Mayday, portrays a man in the worse possible period of his life, having lost both his wife and unborn child.<\/p>\n

His performance embodies grief in a more classical way, with anger and the other steps up until acceptance.\u00a0 His feelings are more expressed than Ming\u2019s, thus the actor\u2019s performance bounces back and forth between stronger feelings.\u00a0 He makes the viewers feel with him in a more visceral way. For those who do not know much about Buddhism and its funeral ceremonies, the way grieving is handled is very interesting.\u00a0 Over 49 days, the mourner goes to the temple to remember the dead and grieve.\u00a0 After 49 days, there is also an important point at day 100 where the mourner is supposed to stop crying and learn to go on.<\/p>\n

The way the religion is handled in the film doesn\u2019t hit the viewer in the head; it makes sense and actually shows an angle to things that non-Buddhists may not know may not know very well. The temple scenes are shot in a very serene manner and are beautiful.\u00a0 The rest of the film has a serious tone as well, but the temple scenes catch the eye in particular.\u00a0 The scenes in Okinawa also do, but they are more comforting than serene.\u00a0 This film is shot with such attention to details that it makes its runtime go faster and helps get the feelings through without becoming too heavy which is not an easy balance to achieve especially with such a subject.<\/p>\n

Zinnia Flower is a film about death and the grieving process that works.\u00a0 It\u2019s not too heavy but shows the feelings and makes the viewer empathize with the characters.\u00a0 It\u2019s a beautiful and sad film, beautifully sad.\u00a0 The title flower, the Zinnia, and what it represents is explained close to the end.\u00a0 The story is touching and should make quite a few viewers cry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Director Tom Lin made the Taiwanese “Zinnia Flower” following the death of his wife in 2012 as part of his grieving process.\u00a0 The film follows Ming who lost her fianc\u00e9 and Wei who lost his wife and unborn child both in a major car accident.\u00a0 Their loves ones get Buddhist funerals in which the departed\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":21589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[111,113,302,367,1212],"class_list":["post-21587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-arthouse","tag-asian","tag-drama","tag-foreign","tag-z"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21590,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21587\/revisions\/21590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}