China Film Journal

I am not quite sure how to feel about this: Nikita Mikhalkov of Russia and Chen Kaige of China (who is a US citizen, I believe) have won the the Kurosawa Award for lifetime achievement at the Tokyo Film Festival. The award was worth 100,000 USD, which the two directors split.

My ambivalence stems from my opinion that Chen Kaige has become kind of a hack of late, though he has, on the whole, made many more decent films than shitty ones, and has even made a couple of near brilliant or at least close to seminal films in the last thirty odd years.

Of course, this is a pretty good omen for Chen, who has a highly anticipated upcoming film, the Mei Lanfang biopic. They’ve already released the official MV/theme song for the movie, sung by the film’s two co-stars, Leon Lai and Zhang Ziyi.

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

On February 16, Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帅) won his second Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, taking honors for best script for his new film In Love We Trust 《左右》, a film that has one whopper of a premise: the daughter of a divorced couple develops leukemia and the only way that they can save her is by having another child (which will serve as a donor for the first?). There are a couple of previews and interviews on the video-sharing sites. We’re not sure when it comes out in China, but we like Wang’s movies despite their get-under-your-skin-in-a-weird-way sentimentality, so we’re looking forward to this one. The first video is a preview and the second one an interview with the cast and crew.