washington —
Chinese artists walk a tightrope when trying to create content acceptable to Beijing’s standards while attempting to seek success among Western audiences. More than one artist who has gained recognition in the West has been punished by Chinese censors, with Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye being the most recent case.
The 2024 Cannes Film Festival featured Lou’s pseudodocumentary "An Unfinished Film" as an Official Selection, and it drew positive reviews. However, the film hardly has any chance to be publicly screened in China.
“An Unfinished Film” is about a film crew’s 2020 experience at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan.
The fictional plot follows the members of a film crew as they attempt to reshoot a movie, then are forced indoors as the city goes on lockdown.
In the movie version, the wife of Jiang Cheng, the main character, was about to give birth. Desperate to be at the hospital with his wife, Jiang tried to break through the blockade but ended up in a huge scuffle with the security guards. Jiang was beaten up and forced to stay in his hotel room until the lockdown ended in Wuhan.
In the end, the actor, the director and other members of the fictional crew had to stay in the Wuhan hotel and could contact each other only by mobile phone.
The film included many real-life video clips that went viral during the lockdown, including a child crying and chasing his mother who was put on a bus to a makeshift hospital, and residents singing in a locked-down community in Wuhan at night.
The film stirred strong emotions among some viewers at the Cannes Film Festival.
After the film's screening, someone in the audience shouted, "Lou Ye, you are the greatest director in China!"
Another person who watched the film posted on the Chinese social media site Weibo under the name Wu Ke Feng Gao, "In the second half, sobbing was heard everywhere in the theater. The audience in the back row said that everyone was crying for themselves. ... To me, this is the greatest Chinese film in the past decade."
But Zhao Liang, a former Chinese film critic living in the United States who requested to use a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from the Chinese government, had a different reaction to Lou’s film.
"This is a suicidal movie,” he told VOA.
"Lou Ye can't [work in China anymore]; he has killed himself in front of the Chinese government," Zhao added.
He said, "He filmed the pandemic, which is very sensitive to the Chinese government and is a subject that cannot be touched. The Chinese government has destroyed all the files related to the pandemic in the hospitals, as if COVID-19 never happened. All the files on the lockdown and all the records at the time, whether in the government, hospitals or neighborhood committees, have been destroyed.”
Over the course of Lou’s more than 20-year career, Chinese officials have banned and censored much of his work. Only four of his twelve films have made it to big screens in China.
In 2000, his film "Suzhou River" won the Golden Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands. However, because Lou participated in the foreign film festival without official approval, the Chinese government banned the film in China and punished Lou with a two-year prohibition on filming.
In 2006, the Chinese government placed a five-year filming ban on Lou for entering the film "Summer Palace" in the Cannes Film Festival without approval. The film was set during the taboo Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations and included explicit sexual content.
In 2019, Lou said in an interview about making the banned film, “A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind,” “Directors should be able to make movies without being threatened by censorship and express themselves freely. This is a right granted by the Constitution. … The censorship system has made the Chinese domestic audience a second-tier audience, a second-rate audience, because they simply cannot see what they should see, what they have the right to see."
Kong Ming, a former Chinese art critic living in the United States who requested to use a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from the Chinese government, told VOA that in an already competitive industry, Chinese artists have very few options to exercise their creativity.
"Chinese artists actually have nowhere to escape," Kong said. "Even if you give up the Chinese market, you will no longer have the soil for your creations."
Other artists who have faced Chinese censors include internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his often provocative art. He experienced detention and violence at the hands of Chinese police when living in China.