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A Touch of Spring

Li Fang is a Chinese immigrant who has been living
in Montreal for over 10 years. Her infertility and her violent separation from her Québécois husband, Eric, have pushed her to the brink of despair. Escaping the chaos in Montreal, Li Fang visits her grandfather in Dazu, her birthplace in south China. The support and inspiration provided by her family and an old lover helps her break the impasse in her life.

  • Xiaodan He
    Director
  • Xiaodan He
    Writer
  • Aonan Yang, Andreas Mendritzki, Nguyen-Anh Nguyen, Xiaodan He
    Producer
  • Wensi Yan, Émile Proulx Cloutier, Xuan Zhao, Cheng Yan, Kefa Cui
    Key Cast
    "Fang, Eric, Xu, Grandmother, Grandfather, Hong"
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    春色撩人 Un printemps d'ailleurs
  • Project Type:
    Feature
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 27 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    February 20, 2018
  • Production Budget:
    1,250,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada, China
  • Language:
    Chinese, French
  • Shooting Format:
    4K RED Dragon
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • 36th Rendez-vous du cinema Québec
    Montreal
    Canada
    March 2, 2018
  • Perspective Canada in Cannes 2018
    Cannes
    France
    May 13, 2018
  • 21th Shanghai International Film Festival
    Shanghai
    China
    Asian premiere
  • 41th Asian American International Film Festival
    New York
    United States
    July 25, 2018
    Unites States premiere
    Best emerging director
  • Rome Independant Cinema Festival 2018
    Rome
    Italy
    August 28, 2018
    Europe première
    The best drama
  • 18th Reelworld Film Festival
    Toronto
    Canada
    October 8, 2018
    Official selection
Distribution Information
  • Filmoption International
    Country: Canada
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Xiaodan He

Xiaodan He, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, has studied film production at the Beijing Film Academy from 1993 to 1997. Being from a Chinese ethnic minority, Naxi, she worked for the Yunnan Minority Film Studio as an assistant producer and director. In 2005, her short film on the life of the immigrants, Cairo Calling, has received a resounding success, with screenings in over 50 festivals around the world and two audience awards. In 2013, Xiaodan founded her company Red Dawn Productions which has co-produced her first feature fiction, A Touch of Spring. Presently she is writing her next screenplay, Montréal, ma belle.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

A Touche of Spring is a film about how a woman hurt by love and desperate about life gets relief from her journey of escaping. In this film, I want to show the silent sufferance, tolerance and effort when we face the misery and the cruel side of our human life.

The origin of the film came from my birth place, Dazu, a small town in the province of Sichuan in China. Dazu is well known because of its millennium sculptures of Buddhism. The whole film is inspired by a Buddhist thinking on our human's life: to live is to suffer, the happiness is ephemeral that will leave us soon or later. In this story, with the life experiences of the different characters, I present the eight misery of the human life that this Buddhist thinking says: birth, aging, sickness, death, the desire that we can not satisfy, the separation from who we love, the meeting with who we don't like, and the eighth is the nature of human life that can not avoid the other seven ones.

The whole structure of the film is like a prose, I want to use the character of Lifang to reveal the other characters to the audience. Along with her own sorrow, she goes to see and feel the other people's struggling, and bring to them the hope that she herself have forgotten. At the same time, the appreciation and needs for her from the other people gave also relief to her desperation.

As the director of the film, I wish to give the comfort and hope to the people who don't give up the happiness although they are struggling in their life.