Chinese Entertainment: Outside the Circle

Sea of Fire

Synopsis:

In 2005, Zhou Che, a screenwriter who had drifted to Beijing, brings the screenplay he poured his heart and soul into, Sea of Fire, to knock on the doors of Beijing’s entertainment elite.

His mentor teams up with Huayi Brothers to steal the script, then tosses a check for two hundred thousand yuan in front of him. “Kid, this is the money to buy your life.”

He doesn’t take the two hundred thousand.

He puts it into the futures market. He comes from 2024 and knows copper prices are about to skyrocket over the next six months. In three months, that money will become eight million.

Then he does something no one understands:

He sends a text to nineteen-year-old Liu Yifei, inviting her to play a woman with only seventeen lines who spends thirty-one days adrift at sea.

She says yes.

He finds an old sound engineer who sold sheep to buy a microphone, a lighting technician who has been cast aside by Beijing’s entertainment elite for twenty years, and a steely producer who would rather trust an old man than the logic of capital.

Together, they assemble a film crew that looks like a beggars’ gang, ready to shoot an underground film by the sea, one that can never be released.

He doesn’t know the film will make its way to Venice.

All he knows is that in the autumn of 1995, his father called from Ningbo for the last time and said:

“Come home when you’re done with this job.”

This is a story about betrayal and devotion, sinking and rising.

Some lose their conscience at the table of capital, while others salvage half a lifetime from the winds of the Pacific.