Cut down to size

A spat over an extended excision of a soon-to-be-released film illustrates the power struggle inside China's booming film industry and the difficulties of power sharing.

People take their films to festivals for exposure. Eyebrows were raised when whoever was responsible for Rest on Your Shoulder did everything they could to prevent the media and regular audiences from watching their movie at the just concluded 14th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF). First, the director Jacob Cheung was a no-show. Then, unlike the other two Chinese entries for the Golden Goblet Award, this one played only once, and at a very small theater. As if that was not enough, members of the press who waited outside were denied entry to fill up the empty seats, as is the norm.

Rumors started flying. The fantasy film about a woman turning into a butterfly had been trimmed from its original length of two hours to an hour and a half - by none other than the distributor. The fewer the people who watched the full version, so went the rationale, the less the cut would be criticized.