/ARTS WEEKLY/GERMANY: New Focus on Asian Films

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Feb 18 2003 (IPS) - Asian-made movies may not have been among the major winners at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival, but they certainly had a strong impact on audiences during the ten-day film jamboree in the German capital.

Of more than 600 movies screened in Berlin, around 50 came from Asian countries, with China particularly being strongly represented this time round.

The top award went to a film with an Asian story, if not an Asian film. The young British director Michael Winterbottom won the Golden Bear award for his semi-documentary film, ‘In This World’ which depicts the desperate flight of two young refugees, risking everything travelling through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and France en route to England. One of them doesm not make it – suffocating in a container.

The film poignantly deals with one of the big issues of our times – the tide of desperate, impoverished refugees fleeing their homelands in the hope of a better, more meaningful life elsewhere. Only to find themselves at the mercy of ruthless professional traffickers. And then unwanted, even if they have the luck to reach their destination.

There are a million Afghan refugees living in Peshawar, just inside the Pakistan border. Many of them arrived there in October 2001 when the U.S. began bombing their country. Will history now repeat itself in Iraq?

Winterbottom’s theme seemed tailor-made for the 2003 festival, which ended on the very day when half a million Germans took to the streets crying "No war with Iraq!"

Without any clear or seemingly identifiable plot, Winterbottom’s film becomes a life and death drama, in which "the filmgoer feels somehow he or she is personally involved," Jan Schulz-Ojala wrote in the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel Sunday, while hailing the jury’s decision to award the top award to the British movie.

Two Chinese films were featured in the competition’s top Golden Bear section. They were director Zhang Yimou’s 30 million dollar movie ‘Hero’, a sweeping drama about power as witnessed in the story of the first emperor to unite China, and Li Yang’s much acclaimed first feature, ‘Blind Shaft about a murder in a coal mine.

Both films were well received, but it was 43-year-old Li Yang’s movie which scored at the Festival, scooping a Silver Bear award from the international jury for "artistic merit". The movie stars Wang Shuangbao and Wang Baoqiang.

Li Yang worries about current trends in China. "The old morality has been largely eroded," he says, admitting he was shocked by his nation’s transformation after returning in 2000 following 13 years living in Germany.

"People only speak about money, money, money," he said at a press conference in Berlin. "Traditional society is being swept aside to be replaced by a more dangerous life in which it is thought money gives you strength and power."

Based on an award-winning book, his movie tells the story of two men who kill a man down a dangerous mine and then feign grief, and claim compensation from the authorities. The film also charts the lives of China’s rural poor searching for work.

The film has not been passed by censors in China. Li Yang says the country has numerous censors who all have something different to say about "what should be censored."

China’s coal mines often operate with little regard for proper safety or health regulations, critics say. While some 7000 miners die annually from accidents in them according to official statistics, the real figure is believed to be far higher.

Li Yang, it seems, faced political and physical risks when making the movie. Zhang Yimou’s martial-arts epic ‘Hero’ which is already on general release in Asia, was recently nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign language category.

Spike Jonze’s U.S.-made movie, ‘Adoption’, won a Silver Bear award, as did Patrice Chereau’s French-made film ‘Son Frere’. Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore also won Silver Bear best actress awards for their roles in Stephen Daldry’s British movie, ‘The Hours’ which tells an interwoven story of three women.

The best Silver Bear actor award went to Sam Rockwell for his role in ‘Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind’.

China’s high-profile presence in Berlin was exemplified by director Sun Zhou’s out-of-competition feature film ‘Zhou Yu’s Train’ which won top marks from the movie-going public. Completed last year, it had one of Asia’s biggest box-office stars, Gong Li, in a thoughtful love story role with a tortured poet and another man.

"It was one of the most challenging roles I’ve ever taken on," she said in Berlin.

About 30 films from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India and China were screened in the Berlin Festival’s Forum Section, offering a useful snap shot of the current state of Asia’s film industry.

Los Angeles-based Asian superstar Jackie Chan was among the big name visitors to the Festival. Others included George Clooney, Dustin Hoffman, Nicolas Cage, Martin Scorcese, Kevin Spacey and Nicole Kidman.

Chan spent three days in the capital, scouting locations for his forthcoming film ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’. The big-budget remake of the Jules Verne novel directed by Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer) is shooting at Babelsberg Studios and on location in Berlin and central Germany this spring.

Chan plays Passepartout. "I really like the story," he said at the Festival. "It is a great adventure without violence, a sort of a happy-go-lucky kind of film."

While at the Festival he attended a press conference for Mabel Cheung’s documentary, ‘Traces of a Dragon: Jackie Chan And His Lost Family’, screened in the Panorama film section.

The documentary tells how Chan’s family was divided by the Cultural Revolution and he grew up without realising he had brothers and sisters living in China. "I found that this was a film which was really about many Chinese families, and then l decided to share it with others," said Chan.

There was also a strong Indian flavour at the festival. Vivek Oberoi, one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars now busy with a movie called ‘Why? It Happened Didn’t it?’ visited the Festival briefly. Vivek said filming of ‘Why?’ was shut down for two days to enable him to fly to the German capital to promote his debut film, ‘Company’, screened in the Festival’s Forum section.

‘Company’ was released in India on April 12 last year and catapulted Oberoi into the peak of Bollywood’s star-driven industry. Since when he has made four more films and is close to completing his fifth.

In ‘Company’, which runs for 155 minutes, Oberoi says "we tried to integrate the songs more into the narrative. And because students and other professionals will pay two dollars (100 rupees) for a ticket in a multiplex, as opposed to 0.40 dollars elsewhere, lots of things are beginning to become possible – to experiment with the form for instance, and even to have films lasting an hour and 45 minutes without people feeling short-changed.

When ‘Why?’ is ready, Oberoi reckons there may still be time for one or two more films before he takes on the lead role of the Marathi warrior Udaji in Roland Joffe’s U.S.-Indian co-production ‘The Invader’.