Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Accuses ‘I Love You, Berlin’ Producers of Censorship

By PATRICK FRATER and ED MEZA

The executive producer of anthology film “Berlin, I Love You” is engaged in a war of words with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, whose contribution to the movie was left on the cutting-room floor.
The segment Ai shot for “Berlin, I Love You” was axed by the producers for political reasons, out of fear of upsetting Chinese officials. 

But Emmanuel Benbihy, the film’s Shanghai-based executive producer, says that Ai’s segment did not meet the Chinese requirements for inclusion.
“Berlin, I Love You,” whose short takes feature such stars as Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley, was submitted to the Berlin Film Festival but failed to land a slot, even out of competition or in one of the fest’s sidebars. 

Instead, it began its commercial career with a Feb. 8 theatrical release, handled by Saban Films, in the U.S.
To Ai’s surprise, the finished picture left out the segment he shot in 2015, long before contributions from Peter Chelsom, Til Schweiger and nine others went before the cameras. 

Ai directed his piece remotely, issuing instructions by video-call, while under house arrest in China, to Claus Clausen, the Germany-based producer of the film, who co-directed. (Ai later relocated permanently to Berlin.) 

The segment focuses on a boy, played by Ai’s son, who discovers a new city and uses unreliable technology to keep in touch with his distant father.
Clausen cited pressure from distributors uncomfortable with Ai’s inclusion as the reason for the segment’s omission. 

“It was because some of the distributors told us, ‘No,’” Clausen said Wednesday, declining to name the companies.
The decision to pull Ai’s segment was made in order “to show the movie,” Clausen added. 

“That’s what made my heart really bleed. I had an obligation to the other directors and to the other actors. We would have had problems getting the movie out there worldwide….It was a no-win situation for me no matter which way we went. I fought for it till the last moment.”

The rules of the “Cities of Love” franchise give directors final cut of their own segment, but the final say over the film’s lineup rests with the producers.

Benbihy confirmed that the decision to leave out Ai’s offering was made only recently – years after Ai submitted his work. 

In a stream of criticism on Twitter, Ai makes clear his belief that political censorship, or self-censorship, was at work. 

“Chinese movie censorship: Ai Weiwei, Zhang Yimou withdrawals suggest it reaches beyond borders,” he said in one tweet, referring to the last-minute cancellation of the premiere of Zhang’s “One Second” at the Berlinale.
“If someone like Zhang Yimou is facing this problem, if someone like me faces this kind of dramatic situation. Think about the young artist…[China] would lose a whole generation’s imagination, courage, and their passion for art,” Ai said in another tweet.
He retweeted other commentators’ suggestions that his omission from “Berlin, I Love You” was motivated by Benbihy’s desire to remain in the Chinese government’s good graces and to make a “Cities of Love” installment about Shanghai. 

According to IMDb, Benbihy previously tried to launch “Shanghai, I Love You” as far back as 2007, but the project has largely lain dormant since 2009.
Benbihy acknowledged plans to revive plans for “Shanghai, I Love You” this year. 

“Nothing [is] happening on the Shanghai movie yet,” he said. 

“We are working on the strategy and the budget. Not on the financing.”

Film Set in China’s Cultural Revolution Is Pulled From Berlin Festival

By Amy Qin

The Chinese director Zhang Yimou, second from left, receiving an award at the Venice International Film Festival last year. His film “One Second” has been pulled from the Berlin Film Festival for “technical reasons.”

BEIJING — A Cultural Revolution-era film by a celebrated Chinese director has been withdrawn from the 69th Berlin Film Festival, where it was set to show in the festival’s main competition.
A statement posted Monday on the film’s official Weibo account said the film by Zhang Yimou, “One Second,” had been pulled for “technical reasons,” a term often used in China as a euphemism for government censorship. 

Festival organizers confirmed the withdrawal, stating that the film had been pulled from the competition “due to technical difficulties encountered during postproduction.”
The sudden withdrawal of Zhang’s film is a major setback for the 68-year-old filmmaker, who is best known for directing art house classics like “Raise the Red Lantern” and for being the creative force behind the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
While China’s strict oversight of films is well known, it is rare to see a film pulled so close to its festival premiere. 

The abrupt reversal caused a stir within film circles in China, and it added to worries about the Chinese Communist Party’s broadening crackdown on dissent and discussion of sensitive subjects.
Neither Zhang nor the film’s producers could be reached for comment on Wednesday. 

Festival organizers declined to offer more details.
The withdrawal of the film has left many wondering how such a fate could have befallen a veteran filmmaker like Zhang, who is intimately familiar with the complex workings of China’s film bureaucracy and what passes muster with censors.
Some have pointed to the political sensitivity of “One Second,” which tells the story of a man who escapes a Chinese prison farm during the Cultural Revolution in search of a newsreel and encounters an orphan girl along the way.
The Cultural Revolution — the tumultuous decade that roiled China from 1966 to 1976 — has long been a delicate subject for the Communist Party. 

Nonetheless, over the years, filmmakers have found ways to portray the era. 

Notable examples include Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Red Amnesia” (2014) and Zhang’s “Coming Home” (2014).
The difference this time is that the film bureaucracy has undergone a major shift since oversight of the industry shifted last year to the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. 

The change was part of a broader government effort to tighten controls on the media and the internet in China.
Another factor may have been new requirements that films get an official “dragon seal,” or certification of approval by censors, as well as a travel permit to show at international film festivals.
As a result, people with knowledge of the industry say, many films — particularly those that deal with delicate topics — are having a harder time getting through China’s byzantine bureaucracy.
“Supervision has become stricter,” said Zhang Xianmin, one of China’s foremost independent film producers. 

“The space for independent films is shrinking.”
While Zhang Yimou is arguably China’s most acclaimed filmmaker, he has also been in and out of the good graces of the authorities. 

In 1994, his film “To Live” was banned in China. 

In 2014, Zhang and his wife were ordered to pay a $1.24 million fine for violating the one-child policy by having three children.
Xi Jinping has himself been critical of  Zhang. 

According to a 2007 WikiLeaks cable, Xi, who was then party secretary of Zhejiang Province, criticized Chinese filmmakers for not promoting the right values, and cited Zhang in particular.
“Some Chinese moviemakers neglect values they should promote,” Xi said, according to the cable.
Zhang’s film was withdrawn just days after another Chinese film, “Better Days,” was pulled from the Berlin festival’s Generation section. 

Producers of the film, which tells the story of disaffected youth, said it hadn’t been finished in time to get approval from censors. 

But Variety, citing industry sources, said the film had failed to receive the necessary permissions from the Chinese authorities.
Despite the last-minute withdrawals, Chinese filmmakers are still making a strong showing at this year’s Berlin festival. 

Wang Xiaoshuai’s “So Long, My Son” and Wang Quan’an’s “Öndög” are both in contention for the Golden Bear award, the festival’s top prize, while Lou Ye’s “The Shadow Play” is being shown in the Panorama section.
Speaking at a news conference at the Berlin festival on Monday, Lou said the process of getting “The Shadow Play” past Chinese censors had been longer and more complex than he had ever faced before in his career. 

“My attitude toward censorship in the movie industry has never changed,” said Lou. 

“Movies should always be free.”
Instead of “One Second,” festival organizers said they would screen Zhang Yimou’s 2002 martial-arts epic “Hero” out of competition. 

Zhang was the first Chinese director to win the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, in 1988, for the film “Red Sorghum.”
Accustomed to censorship, some Chinese were quick to see through the explanation that “One Second” had been pulled for “technical difficulties.”
“This film was about the Cultural Revolution,” one person wrote on Weibo. 

“Seems like that decade is now having some ‘technical difficulties.’ ”

Sino-American Supreme Rubbish

Matt Damon's 'The Great Wall' crumbles in epic fashion
By Kenneth Turan

Jing Tian, left, Matt Damon, Andy Lau and Cheney Chen in the movie "The Great Wall." 

"The Great Wall" is poised to take a great fall, creating the kind of mess not seen since Humpty Dumpty sat on a similar structure. 

All the king's horses and all the king's men (and there are a lot of them here) won't be able to put this snore of a movie together again.
Starring Matt Damon, the veteran Andy Lau and a host of Chinese stars and directed by the esteemed Zhang Yimou, "The Great Wall" was supposed to be a game-changer, proof that the burgeoning Chinese film industry could make a blockbuster that would be successful on Western screens. 

Not this time.
As the presence of gifted actors like Damon and Lau, not to mention a budget estimated to be in the $150-million range testify, this misbegotten movie, the largest ever shot entirely in China, didn't happen because things were done on the cheap.
Rather "The Great Wall" is a failure of the imagination, a reliance on a god-awful core idea of a fight to the death against supernatural monsters in ancient China and a narrative where each moment is more preposterous than the last, each plot point flimsier than the one that came before. 

If ever a film was made with more money than sense, this is it.
As with the casting, this didn't happen because "The Great Wall" stinted on writing talent. 

The respected team of Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz has a story credit, and the gifted Tony Gilroy, who wrote four of the Jason Bourne scripts, shares screenplay credit with Carlo Bernard & Doug Miro.
The originating intelligence here is likely Max Brooks, who has the first story-credit position and whose background as the creator of "World War Z" jibes with the fact that "The Great Wall" is basically a swarming zombie story set in northern China around AD 1100, with mythological creatures called the Tao Tei standing in for the legions of the undead.
Before we meet these glum creatures we are introduced to a group of Europeans fleeing roving bandits in China's vast outback. 

Top dog is the hardened mercenary William Garin (Damon) and his battle-scarred Spanish buddy Pero Tovar (Pedro Pascal). 

They are in country hoping to pilfer gunpowder, a.k.a. "the weapon of our dreams," and sell it to the highest bidder back home in Europe where the destructive substance is as yet unknown.
Gigantic as the Great Wall of China most definitely is, big enough to be seen from outer space, its existence somehow comes as a shock to these two when they literally stumble on it while on the run. And more shocks are very much in store.
Inside the structure is the Nameless Order, an army so huge it is broken up into nifty color-coded regiments. 

The archers wear red, the cavalrymen don purple, the combat soldiers make do with black, and then there are the all female Cranes, dressed in blue as they do elaborate swan dives into battle. 

Really.
All this is a reminder that director Zhang, despite his start with thoughtful films such as "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern," has devolved into a director known (witness his work on the opening and closing Beijing Olympic ceremonies) for spectacle more than anything else.
Add to that the fact that "The Great Wall's" dialogue, in a bow to the realities of the international marketplace, is mostly in English and you get negligible emotional connection here, a situation that hampers Damon and Willem Dafoe, who plays a random European skulking around the fortress, most of all.
In charge of the Nameless Order is a very capable group of Chinese. 

Aside from Lau as Strategist Wang, there is Gen. Shao (Hanyu Zhang) and the redoubtable Commander Lin (the quietly effective Jing Tian), the head of the photogenic but deadly Crane Corps.
Garin’s skill with a crossbow comes in handy, but because this is a Chinese film he is presented as simply one of many heroes and someone who has a lot to learn (mostly from Commander Lin) about the importance of fighting for a cause not yourself.
The first thing Garin learns, however, is why all those soldiers are stationed on the wall in the first place. 

Preposterous as it sounds, they're there to combat the velociraptor-type Tao Tei, a heaven-sent scourge who appear like clockwork every 60 years to do their worst.
All teeth and nasty attitude, the Tao Tei are, despite the best efforts of hoards of visual-effects technicians, more tedious than anything else, and presenting them in clumsy 3-D simply makes things worse.
Despite all the work that went into it (13,140 costume pieces! More than 20,000 props including over 1,000 pieces of pottery for one banquet alone!) "The Great Wall" is not worth anyone's time.
Commander Lin isn't referring to the film when she says at one point, "It would be better if you had never seen it," but it sure feels like she is.