The 10th annual Deauville Asian Film Festival began a couple of days ago, but we hadn’t been keeping close tabs on it. But lo and behold, what pops up in Google reader other than the news that Chinese director Jia Zhangke won some kind of artistic achievement award at the festival. Intrigued by this we opened up the article, only to find that there wasn’t that much information at all. So we decided to find what we could in the English and/or French press. In English there was just about nothing. In French all we could find was this article, which tells us the various films that won awards (Feng Xiaogang’s Assembly 《集結號》 was one of them) and the directors that were offered some kind of “hommage” — but if you look at the bottom of that link you will see that Jia Zhangke was not alone in this category. There are other Japanese and Korean directors, as well as Chinese actor/director Jiang Wen. So why does the Chinese article only mention Jia? Was that some kind of oversight, or are there different subvisions or categories of “hommage”? In all truth, it probably doesn’t matter. Jia’s already the toast of the European film festival circuit, so no surprises here, but he is still young (38), and we’re still cheering him on, and eagerly awaiting his new movies, fiction and documentary alike. We don’t really read French, but maybe you do, in which case you can find out more here, or here.
In case you’re wondering, as we did, where the heck Deauville is, here’s Google to the rescue:View Larger Map