A Touch of Sin is reported to depict violence, and is self-described as being “based on true events,” a fact that led many Chinese web-users to express surprise that such a cutting-edge social commentary made it past state censors. Before taking the prize, Jia talked with The Hollywood Reporter in Cannes. In the interview, Jia discusses the film’s motivations and influences, how it differs from his previous work, and his hopes to effect change in Chinese society through film:

Now the world’s second-largest movie market, China’s rise as a major player in the global film industry is firmly established. But director Jia Zhangke’s win of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes Sunday gave his country something it continues to hunger for: recognition as a creative force in world cinema, rather than merely a market for consumption.

[...]THR: I can’t think of a single recent Chinese film that addresses social and political issues so boldly that has gotten a mainstream release in China.

Jia: The film will indeed be released in China. Everyone in Cannes has been asking me about this. And the answer is: Yes, it has been approved for release in China.

THR: Wow. That would represent a big moment for the Chinese film industry, no?

Jia: I really want to bring about some changes in China – and not just freedom of speech or freedom of expression. I want to use that free spirit and put it into my films, to let everyone see that with that belief in the free spirit, we can tell stories that help propel society forward, which is ultimately far more important. [Source]

A South China Morning Post report on Jia’s victory in Cannes quoted similar sentiment from the writer/director’s acceptance speech:

“Cinema makes me live,” Jia said as he received the best screenwriting award on Sunday. “China is now changing so fast. I think film is the best way to me to look for freedom.” [Source]

Jia Zhangke is a member of China’s “Sixth Generation” of filmmakers (第六代导演). The Global Times quotes Jia on what sets this cohort of directors apart from their predecessors:

As one of the leading figures of the “Sixth Generation” movement of Chinese cinema, Jia’s works has been popular in major international film festivals. The most notable is “Still Life” which claimed the Venice Film Festival’s top award, the Golden Lion, in 2006.

[...]Jia Zhangke said, “We sixth generation of directors always choose a personal angle, a personal value to observe the society and observe the people. I think China needs personal experience and personal memories, which are very precious to art.”

For Jia and other Chinese directors, showing true images that accurately reflect the country and its people is the best way of reviving Chinese cinema and keeping it in tune in with the rest of the world. [Source]

The last Chinese national to win the best screenplay award at Cannes was Mei Feng for the 2009 screenplay to Spring Fever (春风沉醉的夜晚)—until now, Mei was the only Chinese national to take the award. Unlike Jia’s new film, Spring Fever was produced without the consent of PRC censors and in defiance of a 5-year ban placed on director Lou Ye by Chinese media regulator the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT).

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Click here to view the embedded video.

The Guardian’s first look at the film gives a synopsis:

[...T]he film is [...] an angry, painful, satirical lunge into what the director clearly sees as the dark heart of modern China, and a real attempt to represent this to audiences elsewhere in the world. He sees China as a globalised economic power player suffering a new and violent Cultural Revolution of money-worship in which a cronyist elite has become super-rich in the liquidation of state assets, creating poisonous envy in the dispossessed who hear all about others’ wealth from the internet, and are supposed to gossip aspirationally about it on their mobile phones. A key scene in the film shows someone brooding over Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.

It is a fractured and divided story, like shards of a shattered mirror. Different strands and characters and stories emerge, tangentially concerned with each other. Jia has taken his plotlines from newspapers, violent stories of criminal despair, and by meshing them together, these tales, often involving guns, build up a picture of China as a desolate Wild West of lawless violence and cynicism. A worker erupts with anger at how the mine-chief has somehow been able to afford a sports car and to lease a private plane. Three brothers coming back to their hometown for their mother’s birthday reveal themselves to be deeply unhappy in various ways, and the unhappiness somehow always manifests itself in violence. Two have handguns: one casually slays three guys who have attempted to rob him on the road. Another, who has been telling his wife he has been travelling the country looking for work, reveals himself to be an ice-cool armed robber who doesn’t scruple to murder women in cold blood for their expensive designer bags. Another is having an affair with a sauna receptionist (played by Jia’s longtime leading actor Zhao Tao) and this too ends in a bloody confrontation.

[Source]

The Hollywood Reporter looks at one Chinese web-user’s reaction to the trailer of a film that, “based on true events,” uses the drama of national news to inspire a scathing cinematic inquiry into modern Chinese society:

One Weibo user described the film as seeming “very audacious,” adding: “Judging from the trailer, it contains a lot of critical scenes based in reality that were created with no fear of the censorship system.”

Little was previously known about Jia’s film, but the trailer hints at several storylines based on widely discussed — but never filmed — Chinese social ills and political scandals, such as a notorious case from Hubei province in 2009, when a pedicurist named Deng Yujiao stabbed and killed a local bureaucrat after he reportedly slapped her in the face with a wad of cash and tried to force himself on her (based on the trailer, Jia’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao plays a woman placed in a similar predicament). Another scene features snippets of news footage from the 2011 high-speed train accident in China that killed 40 people and led to a major scandal over mismanagement of the country’s railway ministry – and yet another mentions Chinese laborers killing themselves in sweatshops, a likely reference to the wave of suicides that took place at the factories of Foxcon, the company known as the assembler of the Apple iPhone.

[Source]

The putative use of sensitive headlines to inspire a film that is, by many accounts, filled with the pulp violence of a Tarantino flick, begs a question — what will Beijing’s censors make of this film? The Globe and Mail reports on Jia Zhangke’s confidence that his film, co-produced by a state-funded company, will hit screens in the mainland:

Of course, a Cannes premiere is no guarantee the film won’t get banned: It happened to Lou Ye’s 2006 Cannes competition film, Summer Palace. But Jia’s film has a couple of things in his favour. A Touch of Sin (the title alludes to a 1971 martial arts film, A Touch of Zen) is co-produced by Jia’s production company and the state-backed studio, Shanghai Film Group, which virtually assures its release.

At yesterday’s press conference, Jia seemed confident his film will be seen by its home audience: “The film has been approved by the censor board and we hope it will be released in autumn.”

In China, where Django Unchained, Skyfall and Cloud Atlas were all recently shown with minor cuts, perhaps officials are finally ready for their homegrown brand of vigilante payback.

[Source]

More quotes from Jia’s press conference on censorship, sensitivity, and his intended audience were reported by The Record:

Jia — whose film 24 City played at Cannes in 2008 — said he became preoccupied by the increasingly frequent stories of violence he saw in the media, and wanted to dramatize the stories for Chinese moviegoers.

“In society people often hear about these violent events, but they quickly forget,” he said. “It’s not by turning your back on violence or hiding violence that you make progress.”

Jia said he didn’t think the topics he depicted “are particularly touchy or secretive in any way, because they were already covered in the Chinese press and on the internet.”

But the director also was careful to stress — and the censors no doubt happy to hear — that the stories were timeless, not the product of modern politics, economics or technology.

[Source]

The only Chinese-language film to have won the high prize at Cannes was Chen Kaige’s 1993 masterpiece Farewell My Concubine, and so far Chen is the only Chinese national to have taken the prize.

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Perhaps no work of fiction has returned to me more often over the past eight years in China than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slippery tale of James Gatz of North Dakota, who thrust himself into a new world in desperate, doomed pursuit of love and ambition—a life in which the “dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” I’ve stood in Shanghai, bathed in the lights of a new skyline, and thought of Gatsby’s glimpse of New York, with “the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps.” And at times it’s been hard to think of anything but Fitzgerald’s “universe of ineffable gaudiness”—upon seeing, for instance, the Korean boutique in Beijing with the English name “PRICH: Pride & Rich.”

But to Chinese readers, who have read Gatsby (in translation or in English) for decades, the story has acquired new layers of relevance in recent years, as the initial rush of China’s boom has given way to a more complex economic phase. When Chinese readers talk about Gatsby today, some see a cautionary tale of materialism run amok; others point to the potential danger in the gap between riches and power; and still others recognize the dawning realization that that one may never grasp the dream he so desires. “After Gatsby was gone, no one cared,” a Chinese blogger named Xiao Peng wrote not long ago. “Not his business partners or his friends or his guests. Once everything became clear, Gatsby’s life evaporated like smoke.”

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Post tags: books, films, inequality, literature, materialism
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According to news portal China.com.cn Huang yesterday urged judges to watch these types of foreign films as they would improve their ability to make decisions on important legal cases. But, he added, they should leave their viewing until Sundays – their day off.

[…] Watching action-hero films, Huang said, would improve judges’ abilities to balance emotion with rational thinking when making decisions.

Huang also encouraged judges to study Western courtroom dramas, particularly films about American jury trials in which defendants and plaintiffs try to influence the jury’s final decision.

Sadly, Huang did not offer specific recommendations, but the recent unblocking of film site IMDb may assist English-literate judges in their research.

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In ignoring the official co-production process, the film is challenging conventional wisdom about how best to tap China’s lucrative but tightly controlled film market. Over the past several years, foreign film producers have signed a number of official co-production deals in China under the assumption that such deals were the most efficient method for bypassing the country’s foreign film quotas, which the cap the number of foreign films the country can show at its theaters each year to 34 each year, provided 14 of them are filmed in 3D or fit the jumbo Imax screen format.

The 2011 film “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” a co-production between IDG China Media of Shanghai and Fox Searchlight, fell flat in both of the world’s largest box offices, making $1.3 million in the U.S. and $6 million in China’s box offices, according to box office database Box Office Mojo and the film’s producers.

Other co-productions have found success in China but failed to win over a global audience. Each installment of the two-part John Woo epic “Red Cliff,” produced by Lion Rock Entertainment and China Film Group, raked in more than 100 million yuan ($16 million) in its first week of release, according to media-research firm EntGroup. A condensed version for Western audiences, meanwhile, earned less than $700,000, according to Box Office Mojo.

The creators of Iron Man hope to win everyone over, so they’ve avoided over-playing any China plot for an easy entry into the market, said Mr. Cain. At the same time, producers have kept things friendly with China by shooting scenes in the country and featuring Chinese stars Wang Xueqi and Fan Bingbing next to Hollywood stars Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow.

As attention gathers around the upcoming release and reception of the third film in the ‘Iron Man’ series, Marvel Studios, one of the companies behind the movie, has released a second trailer for the Chinese audience. From The Hollywood Reporter:

The tweaked Asia-targeted trailer closely resembles the U.S. original, but offers additional glimpses of Chinese actor Wang Xueqi and actress Fan Bingbing, along with a scene of Iron Man taking flight amidst cheers from a group of Chinese schoolchildren in front of Beijing’s historic Yongdingmen gate.

Meanwhile, the Chinese blogosphere is rife with speculation about the film’s rollout in China, with unconfirmed reports stating that Downey Jr. will be flying into Beijing for a three-day visit from April 4-6, during which he will attend the film’s world premiere.

Jointly produced by Marvel and DMG, IM3 drew some fire when the film’s first teaser trailer was released in October and revealed no Chinese actors or China-set scenes. Traditionally, to officially pass as a co-production in China — a status which would allow the film easier access to Chinese cinemas and its foreign producers a bigger slice of box-office receipts — projects must include significant participation from Chinese talent and Chinese settings or motifs.

DMG declined to comment when the Hollywood Reporter reached out Thursday to inquire about the company’s marketing rollout for the film in China. But the Chinese micro-blogosphere was abuzz with excitement Thursday over a tweet from the Robert Downey Jr. Fan Club Weibo account “TeamDowney,” which seemed to suggest some insider information on the star visiting Beijing from April 4-6 for a world premiere.

See also Hollywood, China, & Freedom to Blow Up Tiananmen, which focuses on film censorship and China’s relationship with the Academy Awards and Hollywood, via CDT.

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The original film, based on the novel of the same name, spanned 172-minutes long for European and American markets but was cut to just 137 for its mainland version, according to the film’s directors.

[…] “Although the mainland version is a bit constrained, [we] fully believe in the regulator’s editing standards,” said Cloud Atlas co-director Tom Tykwer, who was in Beijing on Tuesday to promote the movie ahead of its January 31 release.

[…] Material deleted mainly comprised of love scenes, gory sequences and nudity. A number of same-sex love scenes between actors Ben Whishaw and James D’Arcy were also cut from the film due to the Sarft’s strict ban on homosexual content.

Details of changes to the latest Bond film, Skyfall, also emerged last week following its belated Beijing premiere. While The Atlantic’s Matt Schiavenza dismissed the edits as “little more than a government tailoring a popular film for its audience“, Xinhua reported that the altered film had prompted calls for a less capricious censorship process:

Shi Chuan, a professor from Shanghai University’s school of film & TV arts and technology, proposed the enaction of relevant laws and the establishment of norms for movie censors to follow.

[…] “Movie regulators should respect the producers’ original ideas, rather than chopping scenes arbitrarily,” Shi said.

However, he said that he believes the censorship system is necessary for China’s film industry.

[…] During an annual session of China’s political advisory body held in March last year, Yin Li, vice chairman of the China Film Association, said Chinese film-making faces too many restrictions regarding sensitive topics such as public security, diplomacy, ethnic minorities and religion.

“I hope China can offer more freedom to film-makers so that a more favorable environment can be created for the country’s movie industry,” Yin said.

While money from the mainland has attracted attention recently, SCMP’s Vivienne Chow wrote that Cloud Atlas‘ financing suggests a role for Hong Kong in the global film industry:

According to veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Philip Lee, an executive producer of Cloud Atlas responsible for its fund-raising in Asia, Hong Kong has a unique edge in film financing, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Hong Kong is the Asian financial centre and has a long history in filmmaking. With more collaboration with foreign projects or companies, knowing how to find the right match is very important, and Hong Kong has the expertise,” says Lee, who served as an associate producer of the international hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a line producer for Batman film The Dark Knight during its filming in Hong Kong.

[…] “The mainland certainly has capital, but can they find the right people? Not necessarily. Hong Kong can be more active in bridging this gap,” [Media Asia's head of distribution Ricky Tse Chi-keung] says.

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[…] Paramount Pictures just learned the hard way that some things won’t pass muster — like American fighter pilots in dogfights with MIGs. The studio months ago submitted a new 3-D version of “Top Gun” to Chinese censors. The ensuing silence was finally recognized as rejection.

(“Political disapproval?” wondered the Times’ Edward Wong. “Or just good taste?”)

Mr. Cohen’s “Mummy” film, which was shot throughout China in 2007, was a historical fantasy about an evil emperor who is magically resurrected by foreign adventurers in 1946. The script was preapproved by China’s censorship board with only token changes — the emperor’s name had to be fictionalized, for instance. The censors also cautioned that the ancient ruler should not resemble Mao Zedong.

In a 2011 Web post, Robert Cain, a producer and consultant who guides filmmakers through China’s system, described having worked in Shanghai on a romantic comedy that went off script; the director included a take in which an extra, holding a camcorder, pretended to be a theater patron taping a movie on a screen.

The next day, Mr. Cain and others involved with the film were summoned to the office of a Communist Party member who told them the film was being shut down for its “naïve” and “untruthful” portrayal of film piracy. Assuming they had been reported by a spy on their crew, the producers apologized and managed to keep the film on track.

As tricky as dealing with SARFT may be for foreigners, it is all the more so for Chinese filmmakers. Last year, director Lou Ye described the tortuous process of securing approval for Mystery, a film he ultimately disowned in protest.

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Post tags: cinema, film censorship, film industry, films, hollywood, Mao Zedong, movie industry, piracy, SARFT
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As many as 70,000 children are kidnapped and sold in China each year. This film follows three sets of parents in their struggles to locate their missing children.

[…] The film focuses primarily on the experiences of the parents and what the loss of a child does to a family, but it also delves into what happens to the children after they’re kidnapped. An adult male who was kidnapped and sold as a toddler in the 1980s tells the story of how he was raised in the household of a family that purchased him. A Chinese journalist shares the tale of how he uncovered a massive scandal in which local Chinese government officials were found to be forcibly confiscating children and selling them to orphanages, where they were then adopted by unwitting foreign parents. And China’s only independent rescue center for street children breaks down how kids live when they’re sold onto the street.

See also Custer’s related articles at Danwei and Foreign Policy, via CDT.

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The “Transformers” sequel has become China’s biggest box office hit ever by earning 400 million Chinese yuan ($59 million), a publicist for the country’s leading state-run film company said Friday.

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” surpassed the 11-year-old record of 360 million yuan set by “Titanic,” spokesman Weng Li at the China Film Group, one of the country’s two film importers, told The Associated Press. “Titanic” made about $43 million based on exchange rates in 1998, the year it was released.

Weng said the “Transformers” sequel, released June 24, received a wide release on several thousand screens. China had about 4,100 screens by the end of 2008. The first “Transformers” installment raked in 280 million yuan in 2007.

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The first time director and movie buff Cui Zi’en tried to hold a gay and lesbian film festival in 2001, it was shut down by police before it even opened. When he tried to organize a gay cultural festival in 2005, five dozen police officers swarmed the venue, closing it.

But this Wednesday, Cui and other organizers managed to pull off the opening to the five-day Beijing Queer Film Festival with no police and no disruptions drawing only an appreciative and low-key crowd to the Songzhuang Art District on the city’s outskirts… Cui, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, said the events mark a significant moment for China’s fledgling gay movement.

“The biggest change is that I’m not the only one doing this,” he said. “There’s more support from the gay community. Society has become more relaxed and open-minded in its thinking.”

See also other CDT posts on gay culture in China.

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The film will be a joint production between Beijing-based Dadi Cinema and the state-run China Film Group, a Dadi Cinema official told Associated Press.

Filming is due to begin in three weeks. A release date has yet to be announced.

The movie comes amid a surge in interest in the philosopher, who was practically outlawed during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Mao Zedong and his followers criticised him, calling him feudal, old-fashioned and part of the bourgeois hierarchical thinking of the past.

From Telegraph:

The film, which casts Hong Kong’s gangster-movie star, Chow Yun-fat in the starring role, will tell the story of Confucius’s life and his travels around the kingdoms of northeast and central China expounding his political beliefs.

[...]In recent years the Chinese government has invested substantially in the Confucian revival, giving classic Confucian texts greater prominence in university teaching and, in 2004, setting up a network of Confucius Institutes abroad to promote Chinese culture.

However Daniel Bell, an expert on Confucianism, said it would be interesting to see how the film portrayed the thinker’s travels between different ancient Chinese states to persuade rulers to adopt his teachings, a goal that was not realised in his lifetime.

Some Chinese netizens have already chimed in with their opinions on the selection of Chow Yun-Fat as the lead actor. While many are excited and support the choice, others have sharply criticized the decision. Some reactions on Sina.com, translated by CDT:

周润发只能演小流氓,演孔子,他配吗?
Chow Yun-Fat can only play hoodlums — can he fit into the role of Confucius?

喜欢周润发，他演孔子非常合适，值得期待。
I like Chow Yun-Fat. He’s a suitable choice for the role of Confucius, and worth anticipating.

让周润发演孔子完全出于海外影响及‘票房’，但发哥的中文底蕴实在不敢恭维。为什么中国的圣人要请海外演员？这也反映出导演的水平了。
The choice of Chow Yun-Fat was entirely guided by the overseas influence and by the box office. But Brother Chow’s knowledge of Chinese isn’t all that great. Why is China’s sage going to be played by an overseas [Hong Kong] actor? This choice also reflects on the director’s quality.

发哥演孔子是最好的选择，，胡玫导演真有眼光
Brother Chow is the best choice. Director Hu Mei has really got vision.

周润发胸无点墨，满嘴仁义的假惺惺！不配演圣人孔子！！他演的孔子一定是个假惺惺的孔子，谁也别信他的话，太假。反正这部电视剧一定没劲，看几眼就换台。
Chow Yun-Fat is absolutely unlearned. He talks the talk, but can’t walk the walk, and is a totally inappropriate choice for the portrayal of Confucius!! He will certainly play a hypocritical, unbelievable, and fake Confucius. Anyway, this will be undoubtedly be a weak television drama (sic)! Just cast a few glances at it, and then turn away.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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China’s leaders contend that their rigorous suppression of a critical popular arts sector is in the interests of a “harmonious society”, to use current party parlance, an argument that carries considerable weight in a vast nation with a history of internecine conflict. Recent decades have seen China come a long way in terms of economic and social progress under policies of tight control. However, given the many issues faced by the People’s Republic as it moves into the 21st century, China’s rulers are ultimately doing their people a gross disservice by muzzling creative and critical interrogations of the nation’s history and contemporary situation.

It will take more than putting a mindlessly positive spin on every issue for the nation to come to terms with its history and face up to its current challenges.

Blocking, silencing and blacklisting alternative voices might make party cadres and young nationalists feel less insecure, but problems and contradictions don’t disappear simply because they’re not on television.

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Director Xie Jin, one of the most renowned Chinese filmmakers of the 20th century, passed away last Saturday at the age of 85 in Shangyu, Zhejiang province.

A hotel staffer found Xie had stopped breathing in his room at around 7:40 am, according to a report by the city’s government.

Xie arrived in the city on Friday to attend the 100th anniversary of the founding of his alma mater – Chunhui Middle School.

Xie’s alumnus Tu Guanxiong told West China Metropolis Daily that he and some other alumni asked the staffer to open the door, because Xie did not respond when they knocked.

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Thirteen films opened in San Francisco on Friday, ranging from Josh Brolin’s portrayal of the current president in Oliver Stone’s “W.” to “Sukiyaki Western Django,” a Japanese spaghetti Western.

Wayne Wang‘s latest film is not among them, yet it has the biggest release of all.

The director who defied traditional independent film release strategies when the ultra-low-budget “Chan Is Missing” became a hit in 1982 is now banking on cyberspace. His “The Princess of Nebraska,” a San Francisco-shot tale of a young Chinese immigrant dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, is thought to be the first feature film by a major director to premiere – without a domestic theatrical or DVD release – on the Internet.

The companion film to Wang’s “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” which was released in the traditional way – in theaters – last month, “Princess” is available in high-definition to anyone with a broadband connection at YouTube’s recently launched Screening Room (scroll over for film).

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Widespread protests in Tibet this year alerted Chinese authorities and the world to simmering resentment of Chinese rule in the region.

Now, a new film, Fire Under the Snow, sheds light on these tensions by looking at the life of an elderly Buddhist monk, Palden Gyatso, who survived years of torture and abuse in Chinese prisons in Tibet .

The film is scheduled for release early next year and will be distributed by Argot Pictures. Screenings will take place in New York and Los Angeles throughout August.

“When I was in university, I heard the story of the monk who was in prison for 33 years and survived torture and atrocities,” director Makoto Sasa said in an interview.

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