No Release in Sight for Film Exploring China’s Violence

No Release in Sight for Film Exploring China’s Violence

By Edward Wong

Jia Zhangke in his Beijing office in August, in front of an image from his film "A Touch of Sin."Credit Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

When Jia Zhangke screened his new movie, “A Touch of Sin,” for a small group of journalists in his office last August, he said the film would make a round of foreign film festivals in the autumn and then, if all went well, be released on Nov. 9 in China. Now, with winter approaching, there is still no indication that the film will be shown in Chinese theaters.

One clue to the film’s fate has come in the form of a recent leaked directive from the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Bureau. It ordered Chinese journalists not to write or comment on the film. Earlier, there had been a wave of coverage of Mr. Jia in both the domestic and foreign news media as “A Touch of Sin” drew attention at film festivals in New York, Toronto and elsewhere. It had its world premiere last May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Mr. Jia was awarded the prize for best screenplay. Mr. Jia said the state film bureau’s censors had approved a final edit of the film just in time for him to bring it to Cannes.

But when reached by telephone several times after Nov. 9 had come and gone, Mr. Jia avoided talking about what had happened to domestic distribution plans. He said things were “complicated” and “sensitive.” He was quite willing to discuss other work, such as the classes he was teaching and a project with the Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, who has been in Beijing.

Then on Wednesday, after a host of inquiries from journalists and others, and following a message he had posted on his microblog saying he had canceled an imminent trip to Taiwan for “personal reasons,” Mr. Jia released a vague statement through a representative of Xstream Pictures, his production company.

“So far neither Xstream Pictures nor director Jia Zhangke has received any notice that the film is banned in China,” it said. “Xstream Pictures is still working towards successful distribution of the film in China. We have also heard that some Chinese media received notices banning reporting on the film, but Xstream Pictures has never gotten such a notification.”

Among Chinese cinephiles, the film has generated more buzz than any project in recent years. In the coming weeks, it will become clearer whether Chinese eager to see “A Touch of Sin” in a cinema will have to  Last spring, several companies bought distribution rights for European nations and Canada. At Cannes, Kino Lorber, based in New York, acquired rights for the United States, and the film is expected to be released there this winter.

Mr. Jia is the most celebrated maker of art house films in China, and his movies present a dark vision of the country, both of its recent history and forward direction. Perhaps none is bleaker than “A Touch of Sin,” which depicts, through four connected stories, a China wracked with violence because of economic inequities and political corruption.

In the first story, for example, a frustrated miner in Shanxi Province, played by Jiang Wu, the younger brother of the prominent filmmaker Jiang Wen, goes on a shooting rampage against local party officials and the mine owner. Viewers might find the violence shocking, but they are meant to sympathize with the plight of the ordinary town residents and miners, whose dignity has been stripped from them by those with vastly more power and wealth.

“The reality is there are more and more of these violent stories,” Zhao Tao, an actress who is married to Mr. Jia, said in an earlier telephone interview. In one of the stories, Ms. Zhao’s character also takes revenge for indignities forced upon her by local bosses.

So to some Chinese, it has come as little surprise that Mr. Jia’s film has languished in limbo, perhaps because of a change of heart by the censors. Mr. Jia insisted in August that the censors, when they read the initial script of the film, had asked for few changes and were more concerned about snatches of dialogue than the blood-soaked violence. They did recommend that the killings be toned down and the body count lowered, but Mr. Jia rebutted them in a written reply, and they relented, he said then.

“After 2004, from my own perspective, from the perspective of someone who works in the film industry, there was more discussion in the censorship process,” Mr. Jia said. “In the past, no one came to talk to us. They would just say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ”

“If China makes progress, then we must recognize it,” he added. “The censorship process has slowly become more relaxed.”

What Mr. Jia cites as the year he believes the censorship process began opening up is the same year his first film approved by censors, “The World,” was released. Since then, Mr. Jia has made films with investment from state-run production companies — “A Touch of Sin” has financing from state enterprises in Shanxi Province and Shanghai — and followed censors’ suggestions to ensure approval for his films. They were officially released in China, and Mr. Jia was able to take them to foreign film festivals without incurring the wrath of officials, as some filmmakers have after showing unapproved films abroad.

The entire time, Mr. Jia remained true to his vision, and his films won accolades from foreign critics as well as recognition from some of China’s most powerful officials. In March 2007, Xi Jinping, then the party chief of Zhejiang Province and now China’s leader, mentioned Mr. Jia in a dinner conversation at the Beijing residence of Clark T. Randt, the American ambassador at the time. The two were talking about films when, according to a State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks, “Xi recalled that a low-cost, very good Chinese movie by the director Jia Zhangke had recently won a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.”

Mr. Xi was referring to “Still Life,” a film set against the backdrop of people being displaced along the Yangtze River because of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

In the same discussion, though, Mr. Xi made other comments that, in their own way, foreshadowed the conservative ideological entrenchment now taking place in Chinese official circles. If censors have indeed barred “A Touch of Sin” from being shown in theaters, this ideological shift could help explain why. The WikiLeaks cable said that Mr. Xi praised Hollywood films on World War II and paraphrased him as saying: “Americans have a clear outlook on values and clearly demarcate between good and evil. In American movies, good usually prevails.”

By contrast, the cable said, Mr. Xi had found “confusing” a recent film by Zhang Yimou, China’s most famous filmmaker, about imperial power struggles. Mr. Xi said, “Some Chinese movie makers neglect values they should promote.”

Mia Li contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on 11/23/2013, on page C1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Drama Behind Film Awaits Climax.

Source : sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com