free and easy
jun geng/china/99MINS/la premiere
A crook visits a gloomy, snowbound town in northeast China bringing magic soap used to incapacitate the unaware so that he may rob them of money and property. A man is intent on re-uniting with his mother by meeting people through his religion. Two police officers set out to solve a case without any clues. A fake monk begins to work on the issue of solidarity through common pursuit. A forest ranger pursues a tree thief. In the midst of this, a murder takes place. Free and Easy is a farce in which crime is the new normal.
Cast
Xu Gang Zhang Zhiyong Xue Baohe Wang Xuxu Gu Benbin Zhang Xun Yuan Liguo
Crew
Producers Wang Zijian Wang Xuebo Xie Meng
Executive Producer Zhang Xianmin
Screenwriters Liu Bing Feng Yuhua Geng Jun
Cinematography Wang Weihua
Sound Du Chunfeng
Director Statement
Free and Easy tells an absurd story set in a fictitious town in northeast China, where a bunch of hooligans chill and kill each other while hugging each other, caring and suspecting each other while fraternizing with each other. They burn themselves into ash with the hope they raise for each other. In the film, the police officers are kept busy capturing the criminals, the fraud deceiving for money, the forest ranger chasing the tree thief, the Christian believer looking for his lost mother, and the fake monk devoted to group unity, coincidently all come together and perform the story. The film is featured with typical Dongbei style (literally, Northeast Chinese style) humor, full of twists and turns and magnificent mountains and rivers.
Director's Bio
Geng Jun was born in 1976 in Heilongjiang Province, China. Geng
Jun has directed and written many films including Hawthorn (2002),
Diary in Bulk (2003), Barbecue (2004 Festival of 3 Continents, 2005
International Film Festival Rotterdam), Youth (2009 Rome
International Film Festival), and The Hammer and Sickle are Slee
ping (2013 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival best short film winner). Geng Jun also directed Poetry and Disease (2011).