In movies he trust
Tang Yuankai

IN LOVE We Trust, the movie that won Chinese Director Wang Xiaoshuai a Silver Bear for the best screenplay at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, premiered in China on April 1.
The movie was originally slated for March 8, International Women’s Festival, but the production company of the movie received an emergency notice from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television to cancel the planned premiere. Although Wang has won several awards at international movie festivals, many of his works have never been shown in China.
However, Wang said after the premiere that the version being shown in Chinese cinemas is exactly the same as the version shown at the Berlin Film Festival. “Not one scene less, not one scene more,” he said.
The award at the February Berlin Film Festival was Wang’s second Silver Bear. Wang won the Grand Jury Silver Bear Award at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival for his film, Beijing Bicycle, seven years after his first movie, The Days, was shown at the same movie festival.
Shanghai Dreams, written and directed by Wang, won the Prix du Jury at Cannes in 2005 on his 39th birthday.
Yet Wang said the significance of the Silver Bear for the low-budget In Love We Trust, was that it cost just 4 million yuan ($571,000) to make. “This prize will get mainland cinema lines and distribution companies to realize the value of movies and boost Chinese audience’s confidence in local movies,” said Wang.
Talking about his new work, Wang said he had created it out of his “trust in love and trust in Chinese movies.” He said, “Our trust in Chinese movies has to re-ignite Chinese audience’s trust in local movies.”
Like all movie directors, Wang had to take both artistic value and the box office into consideration. He said the production of In Love We Trust was longer than he had expected. He spent one year on post-production, watching his movie more than 100 times. “The top priority is not to cater to international film festivals, but to cater to the audience,” Wang said.
The failure in the domestic box office of Cannes-crowned Shanghai Dream was a blow to Wang. The experience has taught him to maintain his artistic style while considering the market response. “This time I focused on telling a story, a good story,” he said.
In Love We Trust tells of how a middle-aged divorced couple, both remarried and living a peaceful life, try to save their young daughter, who suffers from leukemia, by having another child to act as a bone marrow donor. After in vitro fertilization has failed three times, the desperate parents have to make love. After a painful struggle over whether to tell their spouses the truth, they do so, causing upheavals in their families. But their spouses finally forgive them out of their “trust in love.”
While in Berlin, a French journalist questioned Wang about the reaction of Chinese audiences. Wang replied that he had fully considered Chinese audience’s thoughts on the issue and had given the couple a sound reason to sleep together so that ordinary people could accept the story.
Marketing
Wang devoted himself to marketing In Love We Trust. He appeared at the premieres for the movie in many cities; publicized his cell phone number to listen to audience complaints on the screening arrangements; and got involved in screening arrangements in some cities.
Huang Bin, producer of the movie, said the distribution budget only covers the cost of making copies of the film and so there is no money to spend on posters and advertising. To get more publicity for the film, Wang used his personal friendship with renowned movie directors John Woo Yu-Sen and Feng Xiaogang and rock superstar Cui Jian who attended the premiere in Beijing.
Wang’s efforts paid off as the opening day tickets sales across China reached over 200,000 yuan ($28,571). The movie’s opening night success was remarkable given that April 1 was a Tuesday, a day when most cinemas sell tickets at a 50-percent discount.
However, its success was short lived. Following the premiere Hollywood movies The Golden Compass and National Treasure nudged it out of the box office and the film was shelved in just one week.
Narrow screenings has become a major problem for the survival of China’s low-budge movies. China does not have a cinema line for art movies so they are forced to compete with commercial productions. “This is really unfair,” Huang said.
However, he felt satisfied with the box office result. “It is certain that we will get our investment back,” he said. Huang told Beijing Review that the cinema copyright of In Love We Trust had sold better in Europe than Shanghai Dream; and that other parts of the movie’s revenue will come from selling video copyrights and TV broadcasting copyrights. These three areas of income, domestic box office income excluded, will be enough to cover all the production costs. However, Huang said he understands why Wang attached so much importance to the domestic box office: expecting more of his country people to watch his work.
“It is silly that art movies have to compete with commercial movies at the box office,” Wang said. But he added that he was content with the audience’s recognition of In Love We Trust. “This is among the best box office results my movies have ever achieved,” he said.
He repeated his consistent request for the establishment of an art movie cinema line in China. “Art movies have their own audience and market, whose demands need to be met,” he said.
It has been several years since the commercialized production of movies appeared in China. Zheng Dongtian, renowned director and dean of Beijing Film Academy’s acting department, said, “As commercialization is still at its initial stage, movie cinemas regard selling the largest number of tickets as their top priority. They always screen the most lucrative movies, even at the same time in all of their eight or 10 auditoriums.”
Zheng said China’s cinemas could be divided into several categories. As for the state-owned cinema lines, owners of the majority of cinema screens in China, their managers, appointed by the government, think mainly about how to achieve the largest profits during their term. “This kind of operation model is contradictory to the expectations of movie artists,” Zheng said.
Former underground director
Before 2004, Wang, although internationally acclaimed, had never had any of his works shown in Chinese cinemas. After Wang received an invitation from the Berlin Film Festival to show Beijing Bicycle, which eventually won him the Grand Jury Silver Bear Award, he was urged by the film festival to have his movie censored by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. “The production company waited for 45 days and still did not receive a verdict,” Wang recalled. They could not wait any longer, as it was the deadline for replying to the Berlin Film Festival about whether they could attend and the film had already entered the competition lineup. Under such circumstances, the producer decided to go to Berlin without the permission of the state film authorities.
As a punishment, Beijing Bicycle was never given a permit to be shown in public in China and forbade Wang from shooting movies for one year. During this year, he was given the nickname “the underground movie director.”
Wang first broke the rules of the film authorities by taking his first movie, The Days, abroad to movie festival. The Days was later collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was included in British Broadcasting Corp.’s choice of the top 100 movies of all time.
Starting his career as “an underground movie director,” Wang felt proud of shooting movies without a penny of government investment. “I was so eager to become a director immediately after graduating from the Beijing Film Academy,” Wang recalled. There was no digital video camera and Wang had to find film video cameras. He had no fame or any money.
“The money had run out,” Wang was told time and time again in the early days of his career. He was caught between raising funds and shooting scenes. Today, the anxiety of little money still haunts Wang. “I had the worst phobia during the shooting of Shanghai Dream, but luckily my capacity to borrow money has also progressed 10 times,” said Wang.
Shanghai Dream has become a landmark movie in Wang’s directing career as he was officially allowed to “walk onto the ground” again. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television organized a workshop at the Beijing Film Academy in November 2003, and invited some “underground movie directors,” including Wang and Jia Zhangke. During the conference, the film authorities announced a new policy on issuing movie-shooting permits. In the past, to get a permit required the censor to review the complete screenplay, which could be returned to the producer for revision many times. The new policy requires registration of only a 1,000-character screenplay brief.
Shortly after the workshop, Wang’s Beijing Bicycle became China’s first “underground movie” to have its ban lifted.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)
 

Darfur: The other war we forgot
Aijaz Zaka Syed

IT seems like only yesterday. But it’s nearly two years ago that I did an impassioned piece on the tragedy of Darfur. Thank God, it managed to make its point. It was widely noticed and talked about. It even brought me European Union’s media prize. I collected my prize in Brussels and promptly consigned the issue to the back of that amazing cold storage called human mind. Meanwhile, two years on, little has changed in Darfur. It continues to bleed and burn as ever. The world may have moved on. It might have grown weary of reading and hearing about the conflict in a region that is hardly a stranger to strife and war. But Darfur remains stuck in the time warp where it was two years ago. Only more people have died. More innocents have paid with their lives for the goals and objectives of those fighting this terrible war.
I am sure there are some noble objectives driving this war too. Else, why would Sudan look the other way while tens of thousands of innocent people — its own people — are killed, raped and hunted like animals in the full glare of world media? Two years ago, in 2006, when I wrote that piece on Darfur there were fears that close to 300,000 people might have already perished. Even a conservative survey by the WHO in 2006 estimated that at least 200,000 people had died of fighting and disease and malnutrition caused by it.
This week, the UN humanitarian chief John Holmes told the Security Council that as many as 300,000 people are estimated to have died of war, famine and disease in the conflict. And the UN official says the figures are based on an ‘educated guess’ admitting more people might have died during the past couple of years. Millions have been driven out of their homes and towns into neighbouring countries and wilderness. Sudan of course has once again rejected the UN warnings, just as it has repeatedly done in the past.
It has accused the world body of exaggerating the death toll. Mohamed Ali al-Mardi, a former justice minister, told Al Jazeera that the UN is manipulating figures in order to raise money for its operations in the region. “This is the only way to raise funds from donors and charitable communities — by giving them a very dramatic picture about the situation in Darfur,” al-Mardi insisted. “Now the situation is far better than it has been at any previous time.” I wish I could share this optimism. But then Sudan has always insisted there’s no problem in its Western region. While the UN and numerous aid agencies get all worked up over the grave humanitarian disaster they face daily in Darfur, the powers that be in Sudan seldom seem to notice the epic tragedy that has been unfolding in their backyard. That is what it is, the backyard that Sudan’s politicians want nothing to do with.
And yes, while UN mandarins debate if the toll is 200,000 or 300,000, Sudan has always insisted that the total number of those killed in the conflict does not exceed 10,000. It has repeatedly accused the West, especially the US, of running a motivated campaign against the country in the name of rights abuses in Darfur. Khartoum alleges that it is yet another victim of the Western conspiracies targeting the Muslim world, just as Saddam’s Iraq had once been or Ayatollahs’ Iran currently is. You know what, this is what I used to believe too when reports first surfaced in the Western media about the situation in Sudan. Given the long history of Western interventions and machinations in the Muslim world, this concern is not totally without basis. So it’s understandable if one fell for the claim that the noise over Darfur was part of the Western designs on Sudan and its rich natural resources that include oil. There are several neocon and missionary groups active in the US and elsewhere — some of them corresponded with me after my article was reproduced by many US blogs — whose interest in Darfur is not entirely altruistic.
That said, one finds it hard to accept Sudan’s contention that there is no problem in Darfur. Also absurd are its claims that the extent of humanitarian crisis and the resulting casualties are exaggerated. There have been hundreds of independent accounts that go to confirm what the UN and aid agencies have been screaming about for five years now. Many of these sources are not based in the West and do not share its biases and agenda either. Most of them are genuine and respected human rights activists. It’s high time Sudan is persuaded to face the reality of Darfur. For this issue has been the shame and disgrace of Arab and Muslim world. More unfortunate is the silence of the Muslim world. Save for some half-hearted voices here and there, there has been little or no debate on one of the most disastrous conflicts of our time in forums such as OIC and Arab League. Even the ever-proactive Muslim street is strangely silent over Darfur. I haven’t heard a single voice of protest ringing out there. Tonnes and tonnes of newsprint and television footage have been devoted to the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq by the media in the Muslim world and rightly of course. But where’s our outrage when it comes to Darfur?—Khaleej Times





Pakistan deserves re-entry into the Commonwealth
Sir Cyril Townsend

BRITISH Foreign Secretary David Miliband has just spent two days in Pakistan. His visit followed what he called “the democratic transition that Pakistan and its people have undergone over the last few months.” He declared he wanted Britain to be “a leading voice calling for Pakistan’s re-entry into the Commonwealth, and re-entry into the Commonwealth family where it belongs.”
I appreciate David Miliband is not particularly well known either abroad or even at home. This is not surprising. After obtaining a 1st Class degree at Oxford, he went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Kennedy School). In 1998 he was appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, and in 2001 he was “parachuted in” to South Shields, a safe Labour seat in the North East, for the general election. He arrived at the Foreign Office last June with his personal views on foreign policy virtually unknown. He is Britain’s third senior Cabinet minister and is tipped to lead the Labour Party one day. It is worth noting that this was the second visit by the foreign secretary to Pakistan within a year. He seems genuinely interested in this troubled country, which has huge strategic importance and nuclear weapons. That said, the United Kingdom does have special ties with Pakistan and support for it is an important plank of foreign policy. There are some 800,000 British nationals of Pakistani origin. The United Kingdom is giving Pakistan 480 million pounds in aid over the next three years directed at poverty reduction.
Of course, the security relationship is very strong, and David Miliband will have been keeping a close eye on it. The United Kingdom has 7,800 troops in Helmand province in South Afghanistan. The Taleban use Pakistan as a safe haven in the winter and when put under pressure by British and other NATO troops. Some say Pakistan’s religious schools are excellent recruiting centers for Al-Qaeda and the Taleban. In terms of domestic security in Britain many of the imams arrive from Pakistan and tend to take a very conservative view of Islam. The Security Service has suggested that of the 2000 terror suspects most are under a measure of control from Al-Qaeda leaders based in Pakistan (Somalia, Iraq and Algeria are also mentioned in this context).
Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth in October 1999, and it is entirely appropriate that the United Kingdom should be pushing to have it back in the fold in 2008. The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 53 independent states which has its headquarters in Marlborough House, London. Perhaps to its own surprise it is in remarkably good order, and a network for stability and democracy in our turbulent world. Pakistan was suspended “pending a return to democracy”. Under the principles of good government established in Harare in 1991, all member states have to be democracies. (Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth in 2003). Assistance to other Commonwealth countries normally has priority in the bilateral aid programs of the economically strongest countries. At the official dinner for him in Islamabad — the foreign secretary went on to Peshawar and the North West Frontier Province — he sat with Asif Ali Zardari, the co-chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, on his right and Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), on his left. According to the foreign secretary, Zardari and Sharif were “talking of their commitment to each other, and of their commitment to provide strong and stable and democratic leadership for their country.”—Arab News