Juno Films buys rights to acclaimed China documentary ‘The Silk and the Flame’

Jordan Schiele’s film tells the story of a gay, single man’s struggle with the pressure to marry exerted on him by his dying father and deaf-mute mother

Boutique distributor Juno Films has purchased the worldwide rights to Jordan Schiele’s film “The Silk and the Flame,” which debuted last month at Berlinale and was nominated for the festival’s best documentary award, Variety reported.

The film tells the story of Yao, a closeted gay man, unmarried in his late thirties, whose deaf-mute mother and moribund father exert intense pressure on him to settle down and start a family.

Orphaned during the Chinese Civil War, Yao’s father was ostracized and unwanted when he eventually returned to his native place. In rural China, the size of one’s family translates directly into the scope of one’s power and influence within the community. Yao’s father nursed a lifelong dream of building a large family to guard against the humiliation he was subjected to earlier in life. Now bedridden after a stroke, his dying wish is for his son to marry and deliver him grandchildren.

With the income he earns in Beijing, Yao provides financial support not only to his parents, but also to his siblings and their children. Schiele, an American filmmaker and Beijinger, met Yao through the capital’s music and dance scene. In the film, they return to Yao’s native place to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his family.

Schiele’s camera lays bare the tortuous sacrifices Yao makes in service of the family, the impossible choices with which he is continually confronted, and the fraught communicative minefield which he must navigate during his once annual trip home.

“He’s a hero. He’s actually a very strong figure,” Schiele said in an interview for Berlinale’s Terry Award for best documentary. “We see this vulnerability in the film. We see that he’s a pariah. We see that he has a lot of unfulfilled wishes, but I think he’s also an incredibly strong and courageous person. The irony is that he is living a life that is not necessarily the life he wants to live, but he’s always trying to think of a way to find a better life for the people around him and the one that they want to live.”

By Schiele’s own measure, “The Silk and the Flame” is “about a family that desperately wants to communicate but can’t and the reason is that they each want something different for the family. The father wants his son to fulfill his role and expand the family. The son wants to confide in an audience and that’s why he speaks English when he doesn’t want his family to understand what he’s saying. It’s a liberating space for him in a way. The mother for me was a very powerful figure when I first met her because she had lost her voice through a medical accident when she was 6 or 7. Well she didn’t lose her voice, she lost the ability to speak words. She still remembers what it was like to be able to express herself in a very precise way. So when she uses the sign language that her husband invented for her, she often screams. The family has heard this their entire lives, so it’s something they’re used to. But I remember when I first entered the house where his parents live, I thought something was terribly wrong. For me that sound is very representative of all three characters — I think all of them have a very strong desire to say what they want from the other people in this family, and yet they’re unable to communicate.”

“Rather than hammering out an ethical argument,” Art Forum writes in a review of the film, “Schiele uses stark black-and-white photography to evince a fascinating and subtle narrative that reveals how deeply entrenched his subjects are in China’s tumultuous history of the past century, the Confucian values that shape society, and his subjects’ battles with the simple means of communication that most of us take for granted.”

Variety reports that the documentary is slated for a nationwide theatrical release in late 2018.

Watch the trailer here, an excerpt of the film here, and an extended interview with Schiele here: