Uncensored look at changing China at Berlin Film Festival

(AFP)
Updated: 2007-02-17 11:28

Chinese directors at this year's Berlin Film Festival are taking a critical look at the effects of unbridled capitalism on their country with one film in competition falling foul of the censors.

Li Yu's "Lost in Beijing" (Ping Guo) made waves even before its scheduled world premiere Friday.

The authorities ordered the film to be cut for showing what they deemed an unflattering portrait of life in the Chinese capital.

But producer Fang Li said the uncut version would be shown in Berlin because the director had not had time to subtitle the approved version in English and in German -- a rule for participation in the festival.

The result was the screening of a version that had raised the objections of the Chinese authorities, a fact Li, 32, said could have consequences for her future work.

"I think I do have a responsibility to make such films, to show these things in the films. That is the way I work," she said.

"It may get difficult when I get back, but it's not going to be a question I'm going to look into before I do another film."

The sexually explicit drama features Hong Kong-born superstar Tony Leung of "The Lover" as the owner of a foot massage parlour. It offers a grim look at two married couples in Beijing where love and even children have their price.

When the title character arrives at work drunk, Leung's character Lin Dong rapes her and is caught in the act by her husband, a high-rise window cleaner.

But when she becomes pregnant, the two men strike a cynical deal.

Fang said he saw the problem with the censors as a generational one, with older officials unable to accept the realities of young urban life.

"It isn't just the sex scenes and the gambling scenes that were at issue because basically this film isn't about sex and gambling," he said.

"The problem we ran into with the censors was primarily a life situation. How do people react and behave? When young people see this film, they will think these are just everyday Beijing life scenes, completely normal to them.

"But for older people much of this is completely unusual and not something they are familiar with."

He cited a married woman in the film who seduces a much younger man and another character who is fired from the massage parlour and falls into prostitution as problems for the censors.

"The older gentlemen asked me how that was possible -- such a simple girl, how can she end up morally so debauched," he said.

"We didn't come to any agreement on these problems. Our aim is to portray reality."

Li said she had made a film that reflected real life in her city, where workers from the countryside can get lost in its frenetic rhythms.

"Business is developing extremely fast in China which is a very good thing but at the same time people can't always keep pace," she said.

"Lots of problems arise. Many people end up with all sorts of hopes and yet they see that moral ideas and human relationships are also changing."

The other Chinese movie among the 22 films in competition, "Tuya's Marriage" (Tuya De Hunshi), examines the drastic social and economic effects of China's rural exodus.

The film, which is one of the critics' favourites to be awarded the Golden Bear prize for best film Saturday, tells the story of a woman who must choose between love and her family's survival in the Mongolian steppes.

"This is what we are sacrificing in the name of economic growth," director Wang Quan'an said

Though funded by South Korea and France, another competition entry, "Hyazgar" (Desert Dream), is directed by a Chinese filmmaker, Zhang Lu.

He also touches on the theme of the shifting social trends in Mongolia, showing a farmer trying in vain to hold back the encroaching desert when all around him have given up and headed for the city.

The festival wraps up Sunday.