Archive--1998--

Zhang keeps his cool
The famed Chinese director comes to Montreal (along with several top Chinese bureaucrats) for a Beijing backed film festival.
by Alan Hustax

Acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou, who has often run afoul of Chinese film censors, is in Montreal this week for the Celebration of Chinese Cinema--under the watchful eye of several senior Beijing bureaucrats.

Zhang let China's deputy film minister do most of the talking yesterday at a press conference at the Imperial Cinema to promote the traveling festival, which will hit five North American cities. Top Chinese directors are traveling with their movies, to promote Chinese cinema in North America.

The festival's centrepiece is a retropspective of Zhang's works.

Conspicuous by its absence is his latest film, Keep Cool. The film was pulled from the Cannes film festival last year, and Chinese authorities have accused Zhang of protraying a negative image of China.

Another of his films, To Live, won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize in 1994 (although the Chinese government effectively prohibited Zhang from picking up the prize).

The film-which depicts China's turbulent history during the past 50 years--was banned by Chinese authorities.

China's deputy minister of radio, film and television, Zhao Shi, said she didn't know why Keep Cool wasn't in the lineup for this festival, which is being done in collaboration with the Chinese government.

Pressed to explain why Zhang's movie was banned in China, she said she didn't know. She said

she was new to the job. "There is no film censorship in China," she said. "But why don't we talk about the films that are on the lineup, instead of the ones that are not?"

Among the other film-makers in town is Feng Xiao Ning, who claims he started this winter's Tibet-themed movie trend. His movie, Red River Valley, is about the 1904 British invasion of Tibet.

Unlike Jean-Jacques Annaud (who did Seven Years in Tibet) and Martin Scorsese (the director of Kundun), the Chinese director shot his film on location. Asked if his film was made in response to the two Hollywood films, Feng said his was the first Tibet movie.

"I worte the script in 1994, got the funding for the movie in 1995 and shot it in 1996. I was vaguely aware the American films were being made, but they are about an entirely different thing.

"I made Red River Valley to show love between human beings, to show that the Chinese love Tibet and Tibetan people."

He denied the movie was propaganda for China, which has annexed Tibet. "The line between history and propaganda is always blurred," he said. He invited "further feedback from a North American audience.

"I have told a true story," he said. "It's a love story of a Tibetan man and woman who are changed when the British attempt to civilize a people whom they consider backwards," he said through an interpreter.

Feng said he saw Scorsese's film during an outing to the local movie theatre when the traveling festival was in Houston, Tex., but wouldn't say what he thougt of it. "There were only three people in the audience when I saw it."