The growing power of China’s cinema industry is on show at Asia’s top film festival, but some filmmakers worry that a thirst for blockbusters is hurting quality and creativity.
“It’s a big population and a big market and a lot of opportunity to increase that market,” independent Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帥) said on the sidelines of the 16th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF).
“The problem is that people are doing the one type of film — the big budget, commercial type of film — and there is not much left for the rest of us,” Wang added.
China has a major presence at the festival with 14 films in the main program, studios strongly represented at the concurrent Asian Film Market and Chinese directors and acting talent out in force.
China’s box office receipts grew by 64 percent last year, to touch on US$1.5 billion. This year, official figures showed ticket sales from June to August alone at US$640 million, a year-on-year rise of 77 percent.
With China adding about 1,400 cinema screens this year and estimates that the total will more than double to 13,000 within four years, it is little wonder that the international film community is looking to the east with envy.
However, director Peter Chan (陳可辛) — at BIFF with his blockbuster Wu Xia, along with its stars Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tang Wei (湯唯) — includes one caveat to all those impressive figures.
Chan said while there seem to be more successful lower budget films being made in China, there were still far more blockbusters — and they were the productions taking up all the screens.
“If there are 10 screens, eight will be blockbusters so it doesn’t mean if you get more screens you get more choices,” Chan said.
He said the diversity of film was suffering, with people going to the cinema to watch “really big movies,” while watching smaller productions at home, making it difficult to get lower budget movies made.
Chan was among the first filmmakers to recognize the trend for Chinese blockbusters, taking to Beijing talents he had honed in Hong Kong through films such as Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) and during a stint in Hollywood, where he made The Love Letter (1999).
Since then Chan has been responsible for a string of hits including one of China’s biggest box office and critical successes of recent times in The Warlords (2007). The Hong Kong-China co-production pulled in eight Hong Kong Film Awards.
Wang, whose latest production 11 Flowers has been screening in Busan, believes it might take some time for the success of the blockbusters to spread throughout the Chinese film industry.
“A lot of directors and filmmakers both young and old are happy that they have jobs and they can make money,” Wang said. “But in terms of different films being made, of different themes being explored, it is getting worse.”
Despite having previous success with the likes of Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear winner Beijing Bicycle (2001), Wang turned to France to raise the funding for 11 Flowers because the money was not available to him in China.
Such co-productions have increasingly become a way for Chinese filmmakers to get their projects made. While China allows a quota of just 20 international films to be screened in the country a year, international film companies can still become involved in the market if they co-produce a film with a Chinese partner.
That is how Taiwanese director Tom Lin Shu-yu (林書宇) hopes to get his latest production — Starry Starry Night — into China.
The film had its world premiere in Busan and is competing for the major prize, the New Currents award for Asian directors. Lin said he was able to make his film what it is thanks in part to the boom times Chinese cinema is experiencing.
“It certainly helped this project have a bigger budget,” said Lin, whose film is a co-production with China’s Huayi Brothers studio, one of the country’s most successful in recent years thanks to hits such as Aftershock (2010).
“I was able to dream bigger because my main producer asked me if we wanted to try and get the film into the Chinese market. So when we decided to do that, we were given a bigger budget,” Lin said.
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