Join us every Friday for the month of August for new films premiered by our sister-platform NOWNESS Asia.

Who or what do you believe when you can’t believe your eyes? In other words, how does one validate a personal experience when no two realities run parallel? What Do You Know About The Water and The Moon alludes to the knotty gamut of emotions women are met with during the process of terminating a pregnancy. From loneliness, perplexity, and dissociation to relief and a renewed sense of hope and optimism, the film is a journey of self-consolation and an expression of solidarity with others who have lived through what is a common, but the deeply personal and variegated experience. In NOWNESS interview with director Luo Jian, we dive into details from the filmmaking process, her upbringing and her sensibilities.

Tell us the story behind the English title of the film 'What Do You Know About The Water and The Moon’ and the Chinese title《水母》(shuǐmǔ)?

The Chinese title of the film《水母》is just a direct translation of the term ‘jellyfish’. Except the word jellyfish in Chinese is constructed by two characters: ‘水’ (water) and ‘母’ (mother). Those who speak or understand Chinese will know that each individual character has its own meaning, but if you put two or more characters together, it then takes on an entirely new meaning. The Chinese title is relatively straightforward because I find the Chinese word for jellyfish quite poetic, but deciding on the right English title took me longer.

Growing up in China, Western films were often given very different Chinese names by their distributors. One of the early versions of Lolita is called《一树梨花压海棠》 (yī shù líhuā yā hǎitáng), which describes a tree full of pear blossoms and begonia. Visually, I feel that title really encapsulates the passion of the novel.I remember reading Lolita when I was little and sensing that passion from the first page, where the author walks the reader through the correct pronunciation of Lolita. That passion is difficult to translate on-screen, but the Chinese title somehow captures that essence.

‘What Do You Know About The Water and the Moon’ is from a poem called Former Ode on the Red Cliff《前赤壁赋》(qián chìbì fù). It’s not a 诗 (shī), but a 词 (cí), which is a longer version of a poem. One section goes:

Have you really understood the water and the moon? The one streams past so swiftly yet is never lost, the other forever waxes and wanes yet finally has never grown nor diminished. For if you look at the aspect which changes, heaven and earth cannot last for one blink; but if you look at the aspect which is changeless, the worlds within and outside you are both inexhaustible, and what reasons have you to envy anything?

客亦知夫水與月乎？ 逝者如斯，而未嘗往也。盈虛者如彼，而卒莫也。蓋將自其變者而觀之，則天地曾不能以一瞬。自其不變者而觀之， 則物與我皆無盡也，而又何羨乎？

That section is my favourite part of the poem because it raises the question of what is reality, which is what I was trying to explore in the film.

The protagonists’ aura of uncertainty and detachment from the situation definitely translates. Was the decision for her to speak Mandarin amongst Sichuanese speakers made to magnify this sense of alienation?

These little decisions were not part of the original script, but made whilst location scouting for the film. Wang Yang, who plays the film’s protagonist, is from Beijing and does not speak Sichuanese. But as the film is set in Mianyang, in Sichuan Province, she was determined to take the time to learn the dialect. Somewhere along the way, I thought it might be interesting for her to continue speaking in Mandarin instead. Several other changes were made along the way. For example, the protagonist in my original script was an under-educated, 14 year old girl. But after I got to know Wang Yang, I changed the character based on her personality.

I also had a version of the draft where she takes the jellyfish to the hospital, only to have the doctor break the news to her that this is nothing unusual, that it happens to every woman, and come on, haven’t you heard already? As she continues to be in denial, the doctor reveals to her a collection of jars filled with jellyfish of various sizes from all of the other women who have had an abortion. It’s a very different story.

It’s one of the unsuccessful drafts. After I wrote it down, I realised it sounded more like a sci-fi — a bad one — and less like the personal narrative I was after. But the idea that all of these women went through the same thing appealed to me in some ways because I feel like abortion, childbirth and anything related to a reproductive procedure are treated like a big secret, to some extent. You don’t know and you don’t care about what it’s like until you experience it yourself.

There’s a scene in the film where the nurse tells the protagonist: “Abortion is not a problem. It’s your choice.” I think the scene does really well in highlighting the irony and hollowness of ‘choice’ as the pinnacle of women’s liberation, since it is also often weaponised against women themselves. There’s an assumption that abortion is always a woman’s personal choice, when it isn’t necessarily always the case. The two-child policy in Guangdong province, for example, means that couples, including remarried ones with children from a previous marriage, are often forced to abort a pregnancy. And failure to adhere to this command could lead to being dismissed from your job. When did you first sense this irony?

When I was about five years old, I remember my mum showing me a certificate of honour given to my family stating we are a proud single-child family. She specifically told me about how a contraceptive ring was inserted into her after she gave birth to me so she wouldn’t be able to conceive again. Through research, I now know of the potential risks and dangers of that procedure and the many side effects it could have led to. So, yeah, she wasn’t given a choice. Not that she would have wanted another child, but that choice to have another one was robbed of her in the first place.

Growing up, what kind of information, conversations and attitudes were you exposed to surrounding sexual and reproductive health?

I moved to the US in 2011, but growing up, I had acquired all of my knowledge on sex and reproductive health on my own through the internet. We do have sex health education in middle school in China, but because I travelled so much as a child, I missed out on this experience. When I was 12 years old, I attended a school in Beijing that promised us a sex health education class the next year. Everybody was so excited. At that point, I thought kissing could produce babies. But when SARS happened, I was transferred to another school in Mianyang that already had their sex education before I arrived, so I’ve personally never had a formal sex education. Because of atheism and the one-child policy, I feel like Chinese people always appear to have a rather liberal attitude towards abortion. It’s very absurd because at the same time, most of Chinese society still have a very traditional outlook on sex. So isn’t that disturbingly fascinating, how people are so traditional when it comes to sex, but are able to be so indifferent towards abortion?

Right, because it’s normalised by the state as something that is readily available. When did you start writing the script for this film?

I started in 2017. I was developing many short stories at the time and this was just one of the many unpolished ones. It was originally set in New York City, where I was at the time, but it didn’t feel right, so I put it on hold to start working on something else. One summer, I returned to Mianyang to visit my mum and my grandparents, which is when this story came back to me. I started to think about what it would be like if I could film it there. I changed the script based on the city, and everything felt right. From then on,everything just kind of fell into place.

I usually like to include my Director of Photography in the creative process, but since this was such a personal film, I moved back to Mianyang to spend three months writing and location scouting. When Ming, the film’s DOP, and the rest of the crew members came onboard, the story was pretty much concrete.

One other change I had made during the process was the film’s ending, which is based on Mianyang’s crazy light show. Each light show lasts about three and a half hours. Having seen the light show several times, on one night, I saw all of the lights turn orange to form a huge figure of a woman. This woman stretched as tall as the buildings and would run from one side of the river to the other side of the river. That, to me, felt powerful and uplifting. But after I wrote that down, I never saw that version of the light show ever again. Ming was supportive enough to wait with me for about two hours to catch a glimpse of it. We shot a lot of footage but never caught it.

I was reading about Mianyang and how the city has changed so much to include this light show. Do residents feel detached from their own city?

Definitely. As a fourth-tier city, most residents are not notably wealthy. They enjoy life and they’re very easy going, but the light show disrupts everyone’s lives and there are plenty of complaints over them, especially by my grandfather. As a birdwatcher, he’s very upset that the city’s fireflies have died because the light show disrupts their mating signals. These LED lights are installed everywhere: in parks, on the sidewalks, and they look horrible. But people are so easy going that they just take whatever they’re given. They’re dancing, dog walking and doing taichi beneath these terrible looking lights.

A desire for connection, and by the same token, emotional isolation and vulnerability, appear to be tropes in some of your films, not just in this film, but also in ‘Nobody Says I Love You’ and ‘Cheongsam.’ Do these sentiments stem from more introspective or more extroverted reflections?

I think a little bit of both. It’s somewhat of a cognitive bias, like how you don’t see any pregnant women on the street if you aren’t pregnant, but once you are pregnant yourself, your world is suddenly filled with other pregnant women. Because I always crave connection with other people, I see this same desire in others. Sometimes I write stories and feel like I’m writing for others who are seeking this and that, but it’s also just about my personal desires.