The question that hounds every major Chinese film director was put to director Jiang Wen (姜文) at a news conference this month. Jiang and his business associates had organized the event to generate buzz over the coming Gone With the Bullets (一步之遙), a gangster film set in 1920s Shanghai that is a follow-up to Let the Bullets Fly (讓子彈飛), the top earner in the Chinese film industry four years ago.
The question had to do with a certain gold-plated statuette handed out every year on the other side of the Pacific.
A film from China has yet to win one, and Chinese officials are eager for the cultural validation that an Oscar brings.
“As far as I know, for a film to compete for an Oscar, it needs the recommendation of the country’s film bureau,” Jiang said at the news conference, according to Chinese reports. “You can compete for an Oscar only with that recommendation.”
Jiang later turned to Chinese State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television officials sitting nearby.
“How about just sending us?” he said with some mirth.
Each year, China’s entry for the foreign-language film Oscar is selected by the agency, which regulates the Chinese film industry. Critics of the system say the choices are capricious and hobbled by censorship restrictions.
Last year, A Touch of Sin (天注定), by Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯), was widely praised by fellow filmmakers and foreign critics, but the agency never allowed its release in Chinese theaters, presumably because of depictions of violence and economic disparity. No release meant China could not submit it for an Oscar, and Back to 1942 (一九四二), directed by Feng Xiaogang (馮小剛), was chosen instead.
Two other titles have been mentioned as possible contenders this year or next: Coming Home (歸來), by China’s best-known director, Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), and Wolf Totem, from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which governs the Oscars, has set an Oct. 1 deadline for submissions. Eligible films must have been shown in their home countries for seven consecutive days between Oct. 1 last year and Sept. 30.
Of the three possible contenders, the only one released so far is Coming Home, which premiered in Cannes in May. Jiang’s film is expected this year, and Annaud’s film will probably not be out until early next year. People associated with those projects are already talking about the possibility of an Oscar.
Zhang has long been a favorite filmmaker of the Chinese Communist Party and is known in China as much for directing the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as for his cinematic oeuvre, which includes Raise the Red Lantern (大紅燈籠高高掛) and To Live (活著). However, an Oscar has long eluded him. China submitted his The Flowers of War (金陵十 三釵, 2011), starring Christian Bale as a reluctant hero in wartime Shanghai, but it got little love from critics in the US and did not even make the shortlist of nine films from which the five Oscar nominees are selected.
At Cannes, a Chinese reporter asked Zhang about his “Oscar complex.”
“There is only one chance — that is, you finish it well, then luck strikes, and you are recommended,” he said, according to the Guangzhou Daily. “Then luck strikes again, and five out of nine, you’re among the Oscar finalists. Then only when luck strikes again could you win. You need three lucky strikes in a row.”
Coming Home is a love story set in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, a dark era that is often addressed only obliquely in historical material by Beijing.
In an e-mail interview, Shelly Kraicer, a film critic and festival programmer, said the take on history of Coming Home conformed with official views, and so the film could well be the official Oscar choice.
“Given Zhang’s continuing reputation in the West as one of China’s prime name-brand cultural exports, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Coming Home ends up being China’s official Oscar entry,” Kraicer said.
Another prestige film aiming for a wide international audience is Wolf Totem, based on a popular contemporary novel that serves as a commentary on the settled nature of Chinese civilization and its weaknesses, in contrast to the robust culture of nomads roaming the vast Asian steppes.
A main backer of the project is the China Film Group, the largest state film enterprise. The choice of Annaud as director was interesting because his credits include Seven Years in Tibet, which portrays the friendship between an Austrian climber and the 14th Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 because of Chinese occupation.
No release date has been announced, but China Film Group chairman La Peikang said at a news conference that it might not be until early next year. That means the movie would probably compete with Gone With the Bullets to be China’s Oscar entry next year.
“Which film will it pick in the end?” La said according to one article. “I don’t know, but I am hopeful about Wolf Totem.”
That film has a built-in audience in China, where the book has sold 5 million copies.
For “the local film company, the publishers, the author, the main priority, though, was to make a movie that would cross over and become a mainstream success internationally,” said Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin Books China, which has foreign rights to the novel.
Isabelle Glachant, a French producer who works in China, said she would be surprised if Wolf Totem were the official Oscar entry.
“Somehow I doubt that they will ask a French director to represent China,” Glachant said.
Glachant said she believed Zhang was a more probable choice, since Jiang had once been put on an official blacklist here after taking a film to Cannes in 2000 without the permission from national officials.
She also said that Let the Bullets Fly, an allegory set in pre-Communist China, was “a big political question mark for the authorities.”
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