
“All of Us Cracked Up Hysterically” | Violet Du Feng, The Dating Game

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why?
To me, making films has been driven by the desire to express myself. But for filmmakers like me from more oppressive societies, for our films to reach audiences, we often learn to express ourselves indirectly, through metaphors, creating evocative atmospheres, or embedding subversion into narrative structures. In The Dating Game I was determined to express myself freely without any restraints, be it self or societal imposed, and yet in truth I was completely clueless as to what that would mean or look like.
So on the first day of meeting all of the characters, it was also the first day of the dating camp. They were nervous. The most I heard from them that morning was “Director Feng, just tell us what to do, and we will cooperate.” I was also nervous, as the only woman in an all male crew and an all male cast for the first time. There was a world between us.
Then Hao, the dating coach, took all of us to a golf course to take photos for the dating apps. None of the boys knew how to play golf. Their poses were unbearably awkward and just as I was debating whether I had the permission to laugh at all, our DP Wei Gao roared with laughter and almost dropped his camera to the floor and all of us cracked up hysterically. Then, I tried golfing for the first time too, only to find I was even more awkward. We laughed nonstop for the rest of the day, at each other, and with each other. Somehow, the world between us disappeared and we were connected, deeply. There was no ideology to comment on, no power to fight against, and no agenda to change anything about this tough world. In this weirdest space, we were just being humans, feeling the moments, and finding connections.
My mind kept taking me back to that day throughout the making of this film. I wonder, if my new chapter of freedom is actually about leashing the urge to express sometimes, and with a little bit more patience and trust, I can afford to let the depth and complexity of the world come to me through its own forms and fates, by just embracing being human through filmmaking.