Director of Photography Department of Huayu

Chapter 424 Life can be lost, but intelligence cannot be lost.

The next morning, before dawn, a light mist shrouded the entire city of Beijing.

Wu Chen and Liu Yifei boarded a flight to Jingyu, Jilin Province early in the morning.

As the plane swept past the clouds, Liu Yifei gazed at the vast expanse of white clouds outside the window. She couldn't help but glance at Wu Chen, who was wearing headphones beside her, then quietly poked his arm with her finger and whispered:
"Junior brother, are you listening to Xu Wei's songs?"

Wu Chen took off his headphones and looked at her with some surprise: "How did you know?"

"Look!" Liu Yifei pointed to her feet and said with a grin, "You stepped on my shoes, and you did it with a really rhythmic cadence. This rhythm... it should be 'Blue Lotus,' am I right?"

Upon hearing this, Wu Chen couldn't help but chuckle.

This girl is always so interesting.

"I want to listen too, can I have one of my earphones?"

"Take it, take it!"

As the music flowed gently, Liu Yifei leaned back in her chair, and after a while, suddenly turned her head and asked:
"Junior brother, why did you suddenly decide to shoot a war movie from the perspective of a messenger?"

Wu Chen paused briefly, his voice calm and earnest:
"Because they are ordinary and real. Heroes can represent some of the suffering of war, but only ordinary people truly understand the greater pain and struggle."

Liu Yifei listened, lost in thought.

After the plane arrived at Changchun Longjia Airport, the guide sent by the August First Film Studio was already waiting for a long time, and the group immediately drove to Jingyu County.

The wind in Northeast China in March is still biting, the trees on both sides of the road are bare, and the distant mountain ranges are tinged with a hazy gray.

It was nearly afternoon when we arrived at Mr. Huang Dianjun's house.

An elderly man sat outside, his body hunched over, his face crisscrossed with wrinkles like tree bark, yet his eyes were clear as he gazed at the distant mountains.

"Grandpa Huang, we've come to see you!"

Wu Chen and the others greeted each other and put down the gifts they had brought.

Hearing the sound, a man in his fifties came out of the house; he was Huang Guiqing, the son of Old Master Huang.

"You must be Director Wu. Welcome, welcome. Please come in and have a seat and a glass of water."

Huang Dianjun, who was inside the room, appeared extremely agitated. He grasped Wu Chen's hand tremblingly, his voice choked with emotion.
"The people in the secretariat told me that if you want to film our stories from back then, and if people still remember what we did, it would be worth it even if I died!"

Wu Chen quickly patted the old man's hand gently: "Grandpa, you will definitely live to be a hundred years old."

Liu Yifei and the others echoed her sentiments.

Outside, the sun shone warmly, but inside, everyone felt as if they had returned to that cold and harsh era.

The elderly Huang Dianjun recounted the story in detail:

"In 1938, the First Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army held a mass rally of 10,000 people in Mengjiang County. That was the first time I met General Yang. He was tall, had a loud voice, and broad shoulders."
As soon as the conference ended, he immediately led us to attack the Japanese stronghold.

That battle was incredibly satisfying; there was hardly any firing. We just crept in, picked up our machine guns, and fired a burst from the south end and a burst from the north end. The blood on the ground was ankle-deep.”

As the old man spoke, his eyes shone, as if those years were still vivid in his mind.

"But the good times didn't last long. In 1939, the Japanese army mobilized more than 70,000 troops to encircle and annihilate us. General Yang decided to break up the troops into smaller units and disperse them for guerrilla warfare."

At that time, I was Commander Cao's messenger, and I had a heavy responsibility to deliver orders. I often had to risk my life to cross the enemy's blockade.

One day, Commander Cao had an urgent order to send out. The four messengers who had gone before had all disappeared, so the task was finally assigned to me, Huang Dianjun.”

The room was quiet as everyone listened intently, as if transported back to that era of war and turmoil. Later in the story, Huang Guiqing gently rolled up his father's trouser leg, revealing the still-visible, shocking scars on the old man's leg.

"Including his forehead and the back of his head, there are a total of eight wounds," Huang Guiqing sighed, "They'll stay on his body for the rest of his life."

Huang Dianjun smiled faintly:
"Conditions were tough back then. We often couldn't get enough to eat, and we could only boil corn kernels. We would put the millet in the pot without even removing the husks. But none of this stopped us from fighting!"

One winter, the ground was littered with the corpses of soldiers, and I crawled all the way to deliver the intelligence to the division commander.

Bullets whizzed past behind me, and I had only one thought in my mind: I could lose my life, but I couldn't lose the intelligence.

"Old man, how did you get through that? You're a true hero!" the guide from the August First Film Studio couldn't help but exclaim.

"There were no heroes back then. We were all ordinary people who gritted our teeth and endured it all. I don't even know how I survived."

After hearing this, everyone remained silent for a long time.

Liu Yifei silently took notes, her eyes slightly red, but she focused even more intently on writing down every word the old man said.

After a long conversation, Huang Dianjun, being quite old, became somewhat tired, so Huang Guiqing saw Wu Chen and the others out.

Gazing at the verdant mountains in the distance, Wu Chen asked with some emotion:

"Did the old man stay here ever since the war ended? Did he never think about leaving?"

Huang Guiqing shook his head and sighed:
“The lush vegetation on these mountains and ridges has been stained with the blood of our comrades in the Anti-Japanese United Army. My father couldn’t bear to leave them!”

He said that he would tell his comrades this every year, so that they would know that their blood had not been shed in vain, and that they were now living a good life.

Huang Guiqing paused suddenly as he spoke, then looked at Wu Chen:
"Director Wu, we don't know how you'll finish the film, but my father has a request: you can use any story in your movie, but please don't include his name."

"Why?" Liu Yifei couldn't help but ask.

“My father said that he only survived, and those who did not survive should be remembered, not those who survived. He doesn’t deserve to have his name remembered.”

Wu Chen was startled, remained silent for a moment, and then bowed slightly:
“I understand. But we will include the Anti-Japanese Allied Army's unit number, army number, and division number in the credits so that everyone knows who was fighting.”

Huang Guiqing nodded: "Director Wu, then it's up to you. My father just doesn't want his name to be mentioned."

In the following days, Wu Chen and Liu Yifei traveled almost non-stop to Sichuan Province, Qingdao, Jiangxi and other places to visit many veterans and make extensive records.

This frequent turnover even left the media somewhat bewildered.

Many passersby have seen Wu Chen at the airport these days.

"That's strange. Why is Wu Chen changing provinces every day or two? The premiere is coming up soon, what's he busy with?"

"Maybe they're going on vacation?"

"Go to hell! Who goes on vacation to a different province for a day or two?"

"."

While Wu Chen was busy traveling around, the premiere of "Nanjing! Nanjing!" was held in Nanjing.

As a film with a sensitive subject matter, it has received a great deal of media coverage, but the reports and reviews deliberately avoided the controversy, focusing only on the visuals, emotions, and the actors' performances.

The occasional post or two related to the theme were also quickly deleted.

Surprisingly, after the premiere, the official website of "Nanjing! Nanjing!" suddenly announced:
The film will be released one day earlier, from the original date of April 22 to April 21.

Industry insiders are well aware that this was entirely to avoid the competition from Wu Chen's "The Martian," but they were too embarrassed to release it too early, so they simply released it a day earlier, thus saving face while also making more money at the box office.
(End of this chapter)