In Conversation with Xiaoxuan Jiang

In Conversation with Xiaoxuan Jiang. Born and raised in Inner Mongolia, Xiaoxuan Jiang has taken her debut feature film to some twenty film festivals over the last year, including Venice. Now it has now come much closer to home and in this interview she explains to Amarsanaa Battulga how her local ethnic culture is omnipresent in the film.

“There are layers in the title, such as killing through physical force or killing of a certain way of living.”

Xiaoxuan Jiang is one of the powerful emerging voices in contemporary Mongolian-language cinema. Since its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori section at the Venice Film Festival last year, her debut feature To Kill a Mongolian Horse (一匹白馬的熱夢) has toured some twenty festivals and won several awards. Recently, the film finally came close to home audiences at the 49th Hong Kong International Film Festival held between 10 to 21 April.

Zeroing in on Saina – Jiang’s friend in real life who plays a version of himself in the film as a herdsman and horse show performer – the film wrestles with a series of social issues faced by ethnic Mongolians in China, ranging from climate change, alcoholism, mineral extraction, tourism, to minority language education. As an Inner Mongolian filmmaker, Jiang is perceptive to these issues and capable of showing them through moments of painful irony where a people and their way of living turns into a performative spectacle.

In the afternoon before the festival’s closing ceremony, Jiang and I met in a lobby of the festival’s partner hotel to talk about the characters in To Kill a Mongolian Horse and the actors who play them, the changes in the life and cinema of the region, and how growing up in Inner Mongolia informs the themes of danger and vulnerability she tackles in her work. A few hours later at the ceremony, it was announced that the film won the festival’s top prize, the Firebird Award in the Young Cinema Competition (Chinese Language). To Kill a Mongolian Horse continues its festival run at the Golden Ger International Film Festival where it will have its Mongolian premiere as the festival’s opening film.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Amarsanaa Battulga: Your film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year and now it is screening in a Sinophone region for the first time. How has the film been received here at the Hong Kong International Film Festival?

Xiaoxuan Jiang: That’s kind of a difficult question because I feel that East Asian audiences have some commonalities. For example, they love to stay after the screenings for signature or postcards, but when I was in the States with this film, people usually weren’t as passionate. I think even for the two screenings here, I feel that the audiences are quite different. The first one had more of a regular audience while I feel that the second one had more film students and cinephiles, so the questions went a lot deeper. It’s quite interesting how even within the scale of the same festival, the two screenings felt quite different.

Amarsanaa: In the film, you emphasize the social issues faced by ethnic Mongolians in China more than the relationship between herders and horses. Was this a conscious choice?

Jiang: From the beginning, I didn’t want to make another film about the human-horse relationship even though I love horses and I kind of grew up riding horses. In my region in Inner Mongolia people don’t eat horse meat. The Han Chinese people eat donkey meat, but there are only so many donkeys around while there are so many wild horses roaming all around. I noticed that a lot of the donkey meat that are sold in restaurants are actually horse meat, because they can get it through really cheap ways. That’s one reason why I put the word “to kill” (in the title). I was also thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird even though I haven’t read it. So, there are layers in the title, such as killing through physical force or killing of a certain way of living.

Amarsanaa: Yes, the title also relates on a spiritual level. In Mongolian culture, there’s the concept of hiimori (literally “gas/wind horse”) or soul. While on the subject of titles, you also made a short film in 2022 titled Graveyard of Horses (馬塚). What attracts you to these themes of danger and death in your films?

Jiang: The very north of China, where I live, doesn’t have the most fertile grassland. People from other provinces imagine Inner Mongolia as a place full of grassland. But in my hometown, what we usually see is the edge of the Gobi Desert and in spring right now there are sandstorms. I just feel that the harshness is part of living there and it’s not easy to live a very comfortable life like in southern China. You have to constantly face the harsh winds and the harsh sandstorms. You’re just closer to how transient and delicate lives actually are. Maybe that’s the reason why I’m fascinated with harsh weather, death, and vulnerability.

Amarsanaa: I read from your previous interviews that your friend Saina plays a version of himself in the film and this is his first time acting. Is he still a herdsman and/or a performer?

Jiang: Right before we started shooting the film, he was still performing in the horse show. That was his second year performing and he got so many injuries. He had just recovered from a major broken rib and a few days before shooting the film, he fell from the horse again. It’s just a really dangerous job in general and danger is just part of their life. But starting from a year after shooting the film, he didn’t go to the performance to work there again. Nowadays, he works part-time as a herdsman and part-time as an actor, actually. I think that’s a lot healthier and less dangerous way of living.

Amarsanaa: I’m very happy to hear that. Another actor I noticed in the film is Qinaritu who’s very experienced and has performed in many Inner Mongolian films. In this film, he plays a beggar who appears briefly in two scenes. How did you go about writing this character and casting him for the role?

Jiang: When I was casting for that role, I was looking for an older man around his age who embodies a kind of a spiritual aura – a sort of an old guru-ish figure. I found it’s super difficult to find Inner Mongolian actors like that somehow but I eventually found Qinartu. He’s just a really nice person and even though he’s a lot older than me, it never felt difficult to communicate. In a way, I envision the world of the film as an interactive game. You have to go to certain places and something is happening here and there. When you reach some place after a difficult struggle, you meet a guru who’s going to guide you along the way and into the next thing. When I was writing that scene, it felt like the guru was speaking to Saina but also to me. I like how that felt.

Amarsanaa: Your film reminded me of Ning Cai’s Season of the Horse (季風中的馬, 2005). Have you seen it?

Jiang: I have met the director and showed him my film a few weeks ago. I haven’t seen his film but I want to. It’s interesting that two similar films are made twenty years apart and maybe there are some things that we can compare and contrast.

Amarsanaa: What do you feel has changed in life in Inner Mongolia during these two decades?

Jiang: I actually talked about it with Ning Cai. We both feel that the life in the countryside hasn’t really changed much for herdsmen. The houses are still there and the way of living is kind of still there. I feel that what’s different is that horse shows are once again revitalized after Covid and a new wave of tourism spiked. I think that maybe twenty years ago, all the events and transitions were a lot more intense. Right now, people are in the aftermath of what happened twenty years ago. I feel that people are now more in a limbo stage; the emotions are already mild and internalized, but it’s still there, just not as intense or dramatic as they were twenty years ago. That’s my take.

Amarsanaa: I’ll ask the same question but about film. What do you think has changed with Inner Mongolian cinema?

Jiang: Wow, that’s a big question. Looking at contemporary Mongolian or Inner Mongolian cinema, I feel that it’s become very different things. I feel that back in the days it was easier for people to form a very black-and-white conclusion. For example, urbanism is bad. But nowadays it’s not as easy to say that. In my film, for example, there are road builders and miners who come for a land reclamation project. But when these things happen, some people take it as an opportunity to make their life different or to get rich or whatever. Saina used to work in the tourism industry and I know that a lot of people like him really relied on these jobs to sustain themselves. Even though there are some really lame things about having artificial tourist spots, I think people who work there wouldn’t say much bad things about it because their lives basically depend on it. It’s understandable in a way and no one should have the power to accuse them for not staying against it.

Amarsanaa: I completely understand it because it’s the same in Mongolia. When I look for jobs where I can use my language skills, I have the options of becoming either a tour guide or an interpreter for a mining company and it’s very frustrating. Speaking of frustration, could you please share what your ideas were for what might be the most memorable scene in the film? It’s the scene towards the end when Saina goes into the huge Mongolian Ger restaurant on horseback.

Jiang: The idea for that scene came very naturally. I felt that the whole story was following a certain pattern and it’s not entirely unexpected. Throughout all the scenes of Saina in the horse show, we naturally become the audience who watch the performers and they are part of the bigger canvas that represents the grand narrative or the big picture. But at the end, I wanted to have a moment where the characters, the caricatures on the canvas, come out of the canvas or come down from the stage. All of a sudden, they enter into our daily mundane life and disrupt us from that comfortable conversation. What is that going to feel like for us? Are we going to be offended by it or are we going to turn from the observer into the observed instead? For me, it’s like a playful gesture or an act of passive resistance. It’s just really my style of humor.

Amarsanaa: To Kill a Mongolian Horse is a coproduction between the US, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan. Do you think a release in mainland China would be possible?

Jiang: It depends on whether Chinese distributors are willing to buy it and then go through the process of importing it back as a foreign film. I think if they are willing to go through that process, which is probably complex, then yes. Maybe not in this year or the next, but in the future I think there’s a chance.

In Conversation with Xiaoxuan Jiang

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