Feng Xiaogang's (馮小剛) US$11 million movie Assembly is China's first commercial modern war epic. The director said he hopes it makes a significant step away from the propaganda tone of other Chinese movies of that genre.
Shot in northeast China, Assembly revolves around a People's Liberation Army unit during the civil war in the 1940s, but Feng said the movie also shows the communist soldiers' fears in battle.
In one scene, a soldier urges his superior officer to order a retreat when the unit comes under heavy fire from Chinese Nationalist Party forces, despite orders from higher up to stay put.
"It's understandable if people become weak and afraid in the face of war. It's a normal condition. To not fear death is abnormal," Feng said while in Hong Kong to promote the movie.
"The stuff we saw in the past was a bit fake. We have to overcome this problem. It must be realistic," he said.
The director also said he avoided demonizing the enemy, that the focus wasn't the enemy and that he tried not to discuss "the meaning of sacrifice" in the film which features realistic, bloody gun battles.
In Taiwan, Cannes-winning director Hou Hsiao-hsien's (侯孝賢) new kung fu movie, The Assassin, will be a US$12 million production about an ancient Tang Dynasty woman who's adopted and trained by nuns as a political assassin, an investor in the film said.
Taiwanese actress Shu Qi (舒淇) will play the female assassin, a publicist at SinoMovie, another of the investors in the film The Assassin said.
Hou has also cast Taiwanese actor Chang Chen (張震), who starred in the Oscar-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in an undetermined role and is considering approaching Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano.
It isn't clear when and where the movie will start shooting. No other details about the film have been released.
The US$12 million budget makes The Assassin a big production by Taiwanese standards and marks a departure from the art-house movies that Hou's known for.
Besides SinoMovie, the Taiwan branch of Hollywood studio Fox is also investing in the movie and the Chinese news Web site Sina.com reported Tuesday that Hou is also raising funds at the ongoing Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea.
In Middle East movie news, Abu Dhabi launches its first film festival and fund next week in a bid to grow a movie industry in a Gulf Arab region often seen as a cultural desert and where films are often heavily censored.
Running from Oct 14 to Oct. 19, the Middle East International Film Festival aims to encourage home-grown talent and emerging filmmakers with cash and the Black Pearl Awards trophies.
Running parallel to the festival is a financing effort that brings investors and production firms together with filmmakers to develop local talent and international co-productions.
"This is different in that it is not your normal glitz and glamour festival, to promote tourism, to show your country's best movies," said Executive Director Nashwa al-Ruwaini.
"It has many variables and they all target starting an industry, a movie business out of Abu Dhabi."
The festival is the latest in a series of projects Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, hopes will mark it out as the cultural heart of a region better know for its oil than its arts.
Unlike Egypt, which celebrates 100 years of Arab cinema this year, the UAE was a desert backwater before the 1970s oil boom.
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