A New Old Play

A New Old Play (Chinese: 椒麻堂會) is a 2021 epic film directed and written by Qiu Jiongjiong. As Qiu's seventh film, it marks his first fictional feature. A co-production between Hong Kong's Uluka Productions and France's Hippocampe Productions, the film stars Yi Sicheng as Qiu Fu, a recently deceased Sichuan opera actor, alongside Guan Nan, Qiu Zhimin, Gu Tao, and Xue Xuchun. The story chronicles Qiu Fu's life and career in China from the 1920s to the 1980s through his remembrances during his journey into the netherworld, featuring events such as the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, the Great Chinese Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Qiu Jiongjiong conceived of the project in 2017 after illustrating the biography for his grandfather and Sichuan opera actor Qiu Fu. Inspired to tell the story with film, Qiu based the protagonist on his grandfather and began developing a screenplay from May 2017 to February 2018 under the working title The Neo-New Adventures. Production design spanned six months before principal photography began in August 2019 in Leshan, Sichuan over three months. Post-production took place in France, with French filmmaker Marie-Pierre Duhamel-Muller involved in the editing. The film also marks the second film to be primarily in Sichuanese, after the 1962 film Conscription. A New Old Play had its world premiere in competition for the Golden Leopard at the 74th Locarno Film Festival on 13 August 2021, where it received the Special Jury Prize. It also garnered various accolades and received positive reviews from critics, with praises particularly on its themes, narrative style and complexities, and production design. Due to censorship in China, only single-time private screenings were held worldwide from 2021 to 2022. The film received its first wide release in France on 30 April 2025.