admin @ Tue, 2006-09-12 08:00
Acclaimed Chinese director Lou Ye, whose new film, Summer Palace, is set partly during the Tiananmen Square student uprising, said he plans to continue working in China despite a five-year ban imposed on him by government officials. He said he will try to work in and around the system and find alternative ways to get his work distributed, such as on DVDs. Or he may focus on screenwriting.
As widely reported this week, Lou and his producer, Nai An, were banned for five years by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, an official body that can effectively stop his films from reaching mainland Chinese audiences.
Ostensibly, officials banned him because Summer Palace, an emotionally raw love story that has a few highly charged scenes that take place during the 1989 uprising, was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival without official governmental approval. Now, months after Cannes, the official ban comes as the film is about to be shown this week at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Lou noted that the stark sex scenes may also have brought on the decision. "I anticipated the reaction to some degree," he said. But Chinese filmmakers had been testing the limits of these restrictions in recent years, he noted, and he had hoped that officials would be more accommodating.
Still, he has been willing to change some scenes, saying: "I hope that the movie could be publicly shown [in China] according to the bureau's regulations." Yet negotiations now seem to be off, he added. There are no direct fines involved in the ban.
Lou's aim was to use Tiananmen and even the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall, which also stands as a touchstone in the plot, simply as a background for the film's coarse love story. "This is mostly about the personal change and ambiguities, and the emotional as opposed to the political," he said.
The subject matter was very personal in some ways, he added, since he was a student around that time. He graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989.
"What I'm most interested in, in making films, are themes of how the outside chaos in society and also outside political situations come from the inner feelings of people -- and how it then changes the emotions of people," he said. In this regard, politics and emotions become a jumble.
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