Censors have approved the entry of a controversial Chinese film into the Berlin Film Festival after five revisions, the producer said on Wednesday.
"The process was not smooth," producer Fang Li (方勵) said of the approval of Lost in Beijing (蘋果).
"We revised the film five times and finally got approval for the Berlin International Film Festival," Fang said.
PHOTO: AP
Director Li Yu's (李玉) film is set against the backdrop of the thousands of peasants that stream into Beijing in search of work.
It tells the story of a relationship between a Beijing massage parlor boss, played by Hong Kong star Tony Leung (梁朝偉), and a worker, played by mainland Chinese actress Fan Bingbing (范冰冰).
Li and Fang cut several scenes that the censors apparently thought would show overly negative aspects of China, as well as scenes in Beijing's sensitive Tiananmen Square, the site of a 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
PHOTO: EPA
"We cut all the scenes of Tiananmen Square, the national flag, and we also cut scenes of dirty streets," Fang said.
An official from the National Administration of Radio, Film and Television said news that Lost in Beijing was approved to compete in Berlin was "basically right."
Last year, China banned director Lou Ye (婁燁) from making movies for five years after he submitted Summer Palace (頤和園) to the Cannes Film Festival without official approval.
A tragic screen portrait of Edith Piaf kicked off the festival on Thursday, a fitting opening to a competition where women, many of them in trouble, play a central role.
Alongside them in the main competition lineup of 26 films comes the theme of war, with Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, Israeli production Beaufort and The Counterfeiters, about a Nazi plan to ruin Britain's economy.
Asia and Latin America feature strongly in a typically international selection of films, and Berlin hopes to garnish its reputation for hard hitting world cinema with a sprinkling of Hollywood stars on the red carpet.
Dieter Kosslick, the festival's director, hopes that La Vie En Rose, starring Marion Cotillard as Piaf from the age of 20 until her death at 47, will solve the problem of opening films that have tended to be critical flops.
Singer of classic ballads like La vie en rose and Non, je ne regrette rien, Piaf rose from poverty to superstardom, but the path was strewn with tragedy, including the death in a plane crash of her lover.
Also in competition is Yella, by German director Christian Petzold, about a young woman from ex-communist east Germany whose old life continues to haunt her as she seeks work in the western part of the country to escape a wretched marriage.
Also in competition is I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK, a South Korean entry featuring pop star Rain in his movie debut.
Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski is to film best-selling British author Robert Harris' novel Pompeii.
"Roman said he liked the book, we met in Paris and the deal was done," Harris told the Sunday Times. "It happened very quickly. I'm back in Paris this week to start sketching it out and the filming will start in the summer."
The novel Pompeii tells the story of the Roman city's final days in 79AD before Mount Vesuvius erupted, causing the deaths of thousands of people.
"Since Ridley Scott's Gladiator, there has also been more general interest in the Roman era," Harris said.
In 2001 one of Harris' novels Enigma was made into a film of the same name and featured Titanic star Kate Winslet.
The 73-year-old Polanski won an Oscar in 2003 for directing the Holocaust drama The Pianist.
He has been unable to make films in Hollywood since skipping the US after a 1977 conviction for statutory rape.
The Sunday Times said the film would cost £100 million — reportedly the most expensive film ever made in Europe.
Oscar-nominated Spanish actress Penelope Cruz is to star in the new Woody Allen film, to be shot this summer in Barcelona, a representative of the film's production company said on Friday.
"They (Allen and Cruz) met in New York a couple of months ago and the news has got out," Jaume Roures of production company Mediapro told state radio. "If anyone needed a confirmation, this is it."
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located