‘The Day Is Over’ Director on the Making of a Naturalistic Tragedy
Ann-Marie Corvin Making its European debut at International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Bright Lights section this week is “The Day Is Over,” the directorial debut of cinematographer Qi Rui (“The Sunflowers”), a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy.The feature charts the futile attempts of a 12 year-old girl and her friends to escape from their beautiful but impoverished village and reunite with migrant-worker parents in the city.Left in the care of inappropriate adults and bullied and humiliated by classmates, the film documents how the girls try to keep their heads above water, and then, when all else fails, why they choose to submerge themselves.While the film is based on a real-life tragedy that happened in Anhui 14 years ago, the