This year's Berlin Film Festival may be a disappointing one for Chinese-language films, but perhaps a very promising beginning for Chinese director Li Yang (李楊) and his German-Chinese co-production Blind Shaft (盲井).
The film earned Li a Silver Bear for artistic contribution at the festival, making it one of only two Chinese-language films to win an award at the 2003 Berlinale (the other being Zhang Yi-mou's Hero).
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FILM LIBRARY
Unlike Hero, with its stunning cinematography and fancy kung fu, Blind Shaft is a realistic drama portraying the dangerous coal mines and the equally dangerous human behaviors of greed, treachery and murder.
This documentary-like film is Li's feature film debut, and it made an impressive appearance in the Berlinale's competition section, both in its revelation of the harsh life at the bottom rungs of Chinese society and in its comic twist at the end of the story.
In China, there are reportedly 7,000 coal miners killed in accidents each year. And in many cases, miners' bodies are cremated and buried without the victim's families ever being notified.
The circumstances surrounding these accidents -- the most famous of which occurred in Guangxi in 2001 -- are rarely made public, as many mines are illegal and corrupt local officials (who take bribes from the mines' owners) do not want such details made public.
Li Yang's film is a fictionalized account of one such accident. Two mine workers in a run-down illegal mine have killed one of their fellow miners, a man they had previously introduced to the job as their "relative." They make the death look like an accident and extort compensation from the mine's owner for the death of their "relative," threatening to report the accident to the public.
Returning home with their loot, the two murderers seek another victim. This time they find a 16-year-old peasant boy. The two ask him to introduce himself to the mine's management as a relative of theirs, because they say it will be easier for him to get a job that way. The real scheme is to arrange another accidental death and demand compensation for another deceased "family member."
"What is portrayed here is no deliberate melodrama or dramatization. It's a real story," said the 44-year-old director, who has made three documentaries prior to this feature film.
Making the movie was nearly as hazardous a venture as mining. As many of the owners of illegal mines and corrupt bureaucrats would not have welcomed an effort to dig up the dirt on their businesses, Li and his crew were risking their lives when they filmed 700m underground in the mines of Shaanxi Province.
"One time, I was surrounded by the owners of a mine and [armed] police, and they threatened to take me away," Li said. And of course, the film is banned in China, something which has given it a higher profile abroad.
After Berlin, Blind Shaft goes to Cannes to be screened in the Director's Fortnight section and is expected to be distributed throughout Asia, with one notable exception.
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), alongside their smaller allies the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), are often accused of acting on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Some go so far as to call them “traitors.” It is not hard to see why. They regularly pass legislation to stymie the normal functioning of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) administration, and they have yet to pass this year’s annual budget. They slashed key elements of the government’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special military budget, and in the smaller NT$780 billion package they did pass, it is riddled with provisions that
RSS