by James Fletcher

The lore of the Lunan Railway Brigade of the First and Fifth Division Eight Route Army, might not be familiar to many western audiences, but the small band of railway workers, situated in cold wastes of China’s Shandong Provence, have found themselves memorialised in popular Chinese culture. Their exploits in waging a war of resistance against the occupying Japanese forces during the second Sino-Japanese War are on par with such renowned exploits as those celebrated in The Great Escape, Lawrence of Arabia and Australia’s own Gallipoli.

With a number of books and serials written about the Lunan Railway Brigades legacy, a new feature film from writer director Yang Feng brings to cinematic life the harsh brutality faced by the workers, not just from the cruelty of the Japanese aggressors, but the frozen wastelands of Shandong itself. A beautifully realised war drama, Railway Heroes manages to merge dynamic action sequences and innovative spy craft with the deeply personal motivations of the ordinary men fighting against unfathomable odds to fraught their enemy’s advancement.

With Railway Heroes playing in Australian cinemas, day and date with its Chinese release, we spoke with the film’s director Yang Feng, whose cinematic homage to the 1st and 5th Division is set to mark the director as a force to watch.

“By chance, during 2016 I happened to look up the historical written records about the Jinpu Railway Line,” explains Feng when asked about his familiarity with the Lunan Railway Brigade before embarking on his ambitious project. “I was immediately attracted by the history of China’s earliest railway line which dates back to 1904. My research eventually took me up to 1937, the year in which the Second World War broke out, and when Japan invaded China.

“The Japanese army occupied this main transportation line that ran through China’s north and south. On the Jinpu Line in the Zaozhuang section of Lincheng, Shandong, the legend of the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army and the Lunan Railway Brigade fighting the invaders attracted me.”

With a commitment to honouring the legendary unit with the respect an authenticity demanded by those who fought and died in what would become known as the War of Resistance, Feng acknowledges that separating fact from fiction for his adaption became a formidable task in and of itself.

Choosing to pen the script, and the narrative threads himself, Feng undertook a personal journey of comprehension to truly honour the subjects of his film.

“In order to verify this history, I visited more than a dozen descendants of the Railway Brigade. I also went to the Local History Museum and the Locomotive Museum to conduct research visits. Based on the large number of oral narrations of characters and the support of historical documents, I wrote the first draft of the script of Railway Heroes three years later.”

With the film taking place against the backdrop a particularly harsh winter in 1939, Railway Heroes is a gorgeously framed film, with a deliberate aesthetic that established itself as a effective metaphor for the cruelty of the Japanese army. However, while the hostile Shandong landscape adds a dramatic sentiment that seems to romanticise the film’s historical setting, it quickly becomes apparent that Feng’s quest for authenticity challenged not only himself as a director, but his cast and crew.

“I was also the director of photography for the film,” he explains. “The establishment of the film’s style and tonality was actually formed at the writing stage of the script.

“The story of Railway Heroes takes place in the Winter of 1939, and we chose to start shooting on January 9th in 2021.

“In order to increase the sense of coldness and harsh killing style in the film, we chose to set up scenes in the wild without providing any heating equipment for those shoots. The low temperature shooting environment quickly affected the performance of the actors, but this is exactly what we needed.”

Set to dominate the Chinese box office, still recovering from the pandemic that had forced cinemas to shutter their doors across the country, Railway Heroes boasts a strong ensemble cast, each of whom carry a reverence for the real-life hero that they portray, delivering solid performances across the board.

Led by industry heavy weight Zhang Hanyu (Assembly) and popular character actor Fan Wei (My People, My Homeland), with a notable support cast including former pop stars turned actors Yu Hao Ming (The Eight Hundred) and Vision Wei (Midnight Dinner), with Zhouy Ye (Better Days), Shang Tie Long (The Grandmaster) and Japanese actor Morisaki Hiroyuki (Ganbare! Team NACS), Railway Heroes producer Yang Lei joins the conversation to offer a little insight into how the cast was pulled together.

“We first found teacher Zhang Hanyu,” explains Lei using the honorific of Teacher to refer to his veteran actors. “For so many years, he has portrayed countless popular hero images on the screen.

“Then I found Fan Wei. Fan Wei’s screen image is flexible, and his popularity is also very high. Knowing that Zhang Hanyu had joined us, Fan Wei was also very happy to join.

“Being able to work with so many professional actors at the one time is a rare and unforgettable precious experience.”

However, as the discussion continues, Lei’s praise of his enduring cast turns slightly more introspective as the subject of shooting under the threat of COVID-19 inevitably surfaces, revealing that the film, for all its sprawling action and large set design, complete with abundant extras, faced production with strict safety protocols in place.

“The epidemic had a certain impact on filming, but the impact was not particularly large. Everything was under safety protection. Our shooting environment this time was quite special. We adopted a closed shooting environment, centralised management of staff, and implemented regular covid testing to ensure everyone’s safety.

“Last year, the film industry was shut down for about six months,” Lei continues, almost as an afterthought. “And then it began to recover. Since then, the release of The Eight Hundred has become the world’s No.1 in terms of box office in the last year.”

However, while Lei’s retroactive views on the film’s production are mostly moored in positivity, Director Feng’s own experiences in having helmed the blockbuster-in-waiting embrace more teachable-moments of his time making the blockbuster.

“In retrospect, the process of shooting this movie was extremely difficult. The crew of nearly 1,000 people spanned more than 3,000 kilometres across four cities in this cold winter to work.

“The extreme cold and the degree of control required for foreign personnel in different regions during the epidemic made us exhausted.

“If I were going to do this again, I’d try to avoid the transition of a large-scale team and focus on single location in which to shoot, which would save time and costs.”

Railway Heroes is in cinemas now.