Stars and communism meet at Shanghai Film Festival

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The 9th Shanghai International Film
Festival opened on Saturday, drawing Hollywood stars to China’s
financial capital as the country’s cultural life begins to
catch up with its economic boom.

Jackie Chan, Nicole Kidman, Luc Besson, Andie MacDowell and
Liam Neeson were among those due at the 1930s-era Shanghai
Concert Hall. So too was 29-year-old Zhou Xun, star of “The
Little Chinese Seamstress” and this year’s “The Banquet.”

The opening ceremony will include a screening of “The White
Countess,” a love story about a blind American diplomat and a
Russian refugee living in 1930s Shanghai written by Kazuo
Ishiguro and directed by James Ivory.

Seventeen films will vie for the Golden Goblet, the
festival’s top prize. Among those on the shortlist are two
Chinese offerings, “The Music Box,” by late Shanghai director
Chen Yifei, and “The Forest Ranger,” directed by Qi Jian.

“The Music Box” is a love story, set during and after the
Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, between a fugitive
barber who killed a Japanese officer, and the concubine-to-be
Jia Yi, who he meets in the village to which he flees.

“The Forest Ranger,” awarded Best Feature at the 13th
Beijing Student Film Festival, concerns a guard sent to work in
a state-owned forest who faces up to the three brothers
illegally logging the area.

Local rising stars will have their eye on the Asian New
Talent Prize Competition, an award that will go to one of 10
films, including three from China and two from Japan.

Among them is the “International Military Tribunal Far
East,” directed by China’s Gao Qunshu, a story about a Chinese
judge sent to Japan by the Nationalist government. “The Silent
Holy Stones,” set in Tibet, and “Trouble Makers,” about a
Chinese village’s struggle to overthrow a family that exploits
it, are also up for the award.

Local media have reported the festival also commemorates
the 85th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist
Party in a 1921 meeting that took place just a few minutes’
walk from the hall where the film festival opened.

But under Mao Zedong’s rein Shanghai’s cosmopolitan image
as the “Pearl of the East” ended and its vibrant film industry
was stifled by ideological zeal that stamped out bourgeois
offerings in favor of more socialist realist fare.

While Chinese cinema has witnessed a revival in the
post-Mao era, the content of local movies is still vetted by
government censors and the numbers of foreign films approved
for distribution is tightly controlled.

The nationalist content of this year’s “Military Tribunal
Far East,” along with the pro-party subtext of “The Forest
Ranger,” suggest the festival’s content may have been honed to
please the party.