Asian films were big winners at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday, led by gritty Chinese thriller Bai Ri Yan Huo (白日焰火, Black Coal, Thin Ice), about an overweight detective pursuing a serial killer, which took the top Golden Bear prize.
Liao Fan (廖凡), who said he put on 20kg and drank more alcohol to play the role of detective Zhang Zili (張自力), was named Best Actor.
“It’s really hard to believe this dream has come true,” a stunned Diao Yinan (刁亦男), director of the winning film, told the audience at the Berlinale Palast.
Photo: EPA
Haru Kuroki, who won Best Actress for her portrayal of a housemaid in Tokyo before and during World War II in the Japanese film Chiisai Ouchi (The Little House), said she wanted to leap for joy, but it was difficult while wearing a kimono.
American Richard Linklater was named Best Director for his coming-of-age film Boyhood, which used the same child actors over a 12-year span, while Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel took the Silver Bear grand jury prize.
Ethiopian film Difret, based on a real case of bride abduction in Ethiopia and backed by actress Angelina Jolie, took the audience award.
“I’d expected the Chinese films to do really well and Black Coal, Thin Ice is very good,” Scott Roxborough, the Berlin bureau chief for trade publication the Hollywood Reporter said.
Roxborough said that the Berlin festival has a tradition of honoring Chinese films, having given the top Golden Bear prize to Zhang Yimou’s (張藝謀) film Red Sorghum in 1988.
Black Coal, Thin Ice is “film noir” in the style of Quentin Tarantino and other Hollywood directors, and not in the mould of traditional Chinese kungfu films or period dramas, he said.
“We are seeing Chinese cinema becoming more cinematically adept, not so overtly political. Chinese filmmakers are more confident, more open to the world. China is the second-biggest box office in the world, one day it will take over from America so people expect more stories of all kinds,” he added.
Black Coal, Thin Ice, which is set in northern China, pits Liao’s detective, who at one point loses his detective badge after a shootout in a beauty parlor, in dogged pursuit of a killer who disposes of body parts in coal trucks, an eye in a bowl of noodles and dismembered feet in skates.
Although the opening scene is set in a hot summer, the rest of it unfolds five years later almost entirely in winter.
Diao, who won awards for Night Train in 2007, said he had ignored the advice that “cold films don’t sell.”
He wanted to portray evil and the warmth of emotions beneath to help us all “feel less alone with our dark side.”
The Berlin festival, officially called the Berlinale, is one of the oldest and most prestigious film showcases in the world.
Some critics complained of a dearth of strong entries among the competition films and there was grumbling that the festival, renowned for films with strong political agendas, had given too much space to Hollywood with Anderson’s movie and the international premiere of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men.
“There was never a line-up which was good for the critics, such a line-up doesn’t exist,” festival director Dieter Kosslick said on the red carpet before the awards.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
RSS