Fan Bingbing learns multiple dialects for Malaysian movie, “Mother Bhumi”

4 Nov – Fan Bingbing recently admitted that she had to fully immerse herself in the culture of the rural Malaysian village life in order to play her role in Chong Keat Aun’s “Mother Bhumi”, including learning various different dialects different from her own mother tongue.

The actress, who shed her glamorous skin for her role of the widowed farmer and ritual healer Hong Im in the movie, said in an interview at the Tokyo International Film Festival that it was very hard to portray the character who is very different from any roles she has played before.

“The hardest part was the language. I couldn’t understand a word at first. It was like learning English from scratch when you only know Chinese. I had to speak five or six different dialects in the film, so starting three or four months before shooting, I practiced every day using recordings the director made for me,” she said.

Fan plays a ritual healer in a rural village in Malaysia in the movie

“Every couple of days we’d have a video session together where he’d check my progress. By the time filming began four months later, I didn’t even need to carry a script, every line was already deep in my head. It was key for me to make sure the language didn’t become a barrier during the shoot.”

Fan also admitted that she even tried living with local farmers to learn more about the life of a farmer, from learning how to transplant rice, herd buffaloes and doing actual farm work.

“The most difficult thing was working in the flooded rice paddies. There were snakes, blood-sucking insects, and swarms of mosquitoes; I’d often end the day covered in bites. But I told myself this was part of the process, because that’s the reality of how local people live,” she said.

Fan also admitted that she learned a lot from playing the character, saying that she took strength from Hong Im, who faces her own pain and confusion while being seen as someone who has great powers.