City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan)
The New York Times reports that the Film Forum, one of the leading specialty theaters in New York City, has removed City of Life and Death, a movie about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre directed by Lu Chuan from their spring calendar. According to the article, National Geographic Entertainment, the North American distributor of the film, could not guarantee that a print of the film would be available in time for its scheduled release. (more…)
Sun Spots (dir. Yang Heng)
18 films by Chinese directors or with a Chinese theme will be presented at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs from January 27 to February 7. Among these films include Oxhide II, Liu Jiayin’s follow up to her debut feature Oxhide (recently voted one of the top ten Chinese films of the past decade). Sun Spots, the second feature by Yang Heng (whose debut Betelnut is a dGenerate Films ttle) will be in competition for the VPRO Tiger Award.
City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan’s controversial big-budget feature depicting the Nanjing Massacre, has inspired a sidebar of related films, several of which date back to the time of the historic tragedy.
The full lineup of films can be found after the break. (more…)
City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan)
In the new issue of Cinema-Scope Magazine, our own Shelly Kraicer takes on last year’s Chinese blockbuster about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death by Lu Chuan. Shelly ties the film to the legacy of “zhuxuanlu” or “main melody” propaganda films produced by the government-sponsored Chinese film industry:
A look at City of Life and Death’s genre and narrative strategies can demonstrate its importance in helping to establish what I’d like to call a nascent post-zhuxuanlu cinema. It is a full-out war epic, massively budgeted and vast in ambition. Huge sets of devastated Nanjing were built, and thousands of extras mobilized to illustrate the battle scenes that open the film. Lu films his striking set pieces in a beautifully modulated black and white, where cinematography, art direction, staging, music, and sound design all conspire to create massive, intentionally overwhelming images of violence, horror, and devastation.
Read more of Shelly’s review at Cinema-scope.
For an alternative view of the Japanese occupation of China and the story of “comfort women” – women who were forced to sexually serve Japanese soldiers – check out Ban Zhongyi’s extraordinary documentary Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters.
Filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam (photo courtesy of Friends of Tibet.org)
Chinese authorities have withdrawn two films from the Palm Springs International Film Festival (Jan. 5-18) in protest of the scheduled screening of a documentary about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
The more prominent of two films, City of Life and Death (also known as Nanjing! Nanjing!), written and directed by Lu Chuan, is a critically acclaimed fictionalized account of atrocities committed by the Japanese occupiers in 1937. According to a report on The Desert Sun, a local paper at Palm Springs, CA, the festival director Darryl Macdonald “regards the film as one of the best unsung films in the festival, but said its merit isn’t enough to subvert the festival’s adherence to artistic freedom.” The other film is Ye Kai’s comedy Quick, Quick, Slow.
A report on the New York Times calls the dispute “a bona fide diplomatic incident,” observing that “while Chinese officials told the festival’s director that the filmmakers themselves had decided to withdraw their state-financed works, many China experts believe that it is the state sending a message, rather than the individuals.”
The report also reviews the recent history of “protest[s] by Chinese officials that the arts, and film specifically, are being used as a weapon to meddle in their internal affairs.”
In August, two American filmmakers were blocked from traveling to China to present their documentary about the more than 5,000 children in Sichuan Province who died when a 2008 earthquake caused numerous schools to collapse. Computer hackers and demonstrators took aim at the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia in July to protest its screening of a documentary about a leader of Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, where some 200 people were killed in ethnic violence last summer. And at last fall’s Frankfurt Book Fair, a diplomatic struggle emerged over the fair’s invitation to two dissident Chinese writers to speak at its official program honoring China.
The target of this protest is The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle for Freedom, directed by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam. According to the program at Palm Springs, the film “follow[ed] [the Dalai Lama] over an eventful year, including the 2008 protest in Tibet, the long march in India, the Beijing Olympics and the breakdown of talks with China.”
More news, and a trailer of The Sun Behind the Clouds, after the break.
