Creative Statement
Through life difficulties that any of us might face, the film draws the audience into the protagonist's place and then into memories of happier times. It seeks to capture the beautiful, even unreal, side of memory and to create the feeling of a childhood dream. As the dream fades and gives way to real life, this mirrors the process of growing up. The wild ideas and adolescent fervor of the past gradually disappear; countless "possibilities" turn one by one into fixed realities, and we slowly lose our fighting spirit, which is a loss for everyone. In the story, Ma Liqian's disappearance is Ren Shucheng's deepest pain and regret. He liked her, and had she still been there, the two might have shared some happiness. So Ren Shucheng regrets the choice of his youth for the rest of his life. Like all of us, he sometimes wants to go back and make some choices again, hoping in vain to rescue a life that has already been set. In The Boy Who Flew to the Stars, the protagonists, through wondrous memories of the past, gradually reawaken the passion buried deep within them, which helps them recover a little from their weariness and go on facing the many problems of the adult world. The story also offers redemption for past regrets, and in this way makes up for what we feel we have missed.
Synopsis
Today, middle-aged Ren Shucheng lives alone, drifting through his days. Two young video bloggers, Da Cong and Sangmei, suddenly visit him. They tell him that three fast burst signals recently detected by an observatory have drawn worldwide attention, and that these three signals were "predicted" by a rejected novel, The Boy Who Flew to the Stars. They know Ren Shucheng is one of the real people the novel's characters are based on, and they want to know what happened on the Anran River in 1999. So Ren Shucheng begins to recall a past he has never wanted to face. In high school, he and his friends saw an unidentified flying object fall near the Anran River. Together with Ma Liqian, a young woman with no fixed place in society, they went to a reservoir in the mountain forest to look for an alien creature they called "the Mule". During their adventures they grew closer and made the small island where Ma Liqian lived their secret base, "Sagittarius". In one adventure they encountered the Mule. Ren Shucheng passed out and never saw it with his own eyes. But as an adult he learned from a novel written by Zuo Siwen that Ma Liqian and Zuo Siwen had fought together, and that an alien life form had attached itself to Ma Liqian to protect her from the Mule, which had gone out of control. They needed a high-energy electric field to separate the alien from her and let it return to the Mule so they could go back to the stars together. Because Ren Shucheng had not seen any of it himself, he kept hesitating. Although he decided to help Ma Liqian because he liked her, he could not dispel their doubts. On that crucial day, Ma Liqian vanished along with the island in the high-energy field that Ren Shucheng switched on. Everyone blamed him, and he could not forgive himself. For decades afterward he drifted, his life at a standstill. Now the deep-space burst signals bring them astonishing news...
