Festival in flashback
- Source: Global Times
- [11:12 June 23 2010]
- Comments
By Guo Song
With the winners of the Golden Goblet Award (Jin Jue Award in Chinese) unveiled, the 13th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) came to its close on Sunday at the Shanghai Grand Theater, and the ceremony garnered its usual thrills, surprises and disappointments.
Two films, Kiss Me Again from Italy and Deep In The Clouds from China, turned out to be the big winners of this year's Golden Goblet Award.
Kiss Me Again, directed by Gabriele Muccino, won three awards including Best Feature Film. Chinese director Liu Jie won Best Director for his film Deep In The Clouds which also scooped two other awards at the closing ceremony of the nine-day festival.
More than 2,000 films from 81 countries and regions applied for the competition in this year's festival, hitting a record high, and the more than 140 screenings at 25 major cinemas around the city brought over 300 Chinese and foreign celebrities to Shanghai, good result for the only high-profile film award in China.
The annual festival gained a great deal of ground in encouraging new Chinese talent and meeting the tastes of fans.
This year's Best Asian New Talent Film Award went to actress-turned-director Jiang Wenli for her drama Lan. The film is Jiang's first work as a director and screenwriter.
Jiang, the famous Chinese actress, said the award was a great birthday present - her birthday was on June 20, two days after the Asian New Talent Award ceremony.
The festival has also provided a smorgasbord of movies that had not officially been previously introduced into China.
But, like the previous 12 festivals, this year's SIFF left plenty of space for criticism. Mistakes in subtitles disturbed audiences from time to time.
On June 19, audiences at the Stellar Cinema City and the Yonghua Cinema found two classic black-and-white films had the wrong opening credits.
The British film The Third Man (1949), directed by the Oscar-winning director Carol Reed, was introduced as an Austrian film in the opening credits, and the American film To Be Or Not To Be (1942) by Academy Award-winning director Ernst Lubitsch was mistakenly referred to as a Polish film in its introduction.
The equipment used in the venues also caused problems for audiences. Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) by Michael Haneke, the Golden Palm-winning film at the Cannes Film Festival 2009, attracted a number of film enthusiasts who got a rude awakening in the middle of the film.
"The screening was forced to stop because the Chinese subtitles disappeared during the last 20 minutes of the film," said a viewer named Howie who is working at the Nandu Daily, a Chinese daily newspaper based in Guangdong Province.
The festival does have something of a bad reputation for poor planning and equipment.
In last year's film festival, Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) was screened with the wrong screen ratio.
"The picture was incomplete, and it looked like all the characters had been beheaded," said a Chinese movie buff nicknamed Yaolingyao who has volunteered at the festival for the past several years.
Audiences were not the only ones with bad luck.
At the closing ceremony, Chen Chen, one of the three hosts said: "Let's welcome the Italian director Mr Gabriele Muccino."
But much to her surprise a woman, the supporting actress in Muccino's film, walked onto the stage to accept the award on Muccino's behalf.
The live broadcast caught her murmuring, "I thought it should be a man." Chen was never notified that Muccino would not be accepting the award himself.
"Chen Chen was unlucky tonight," wrote Lin Hai, another host of this year's SIFF closing ceremony, on his blog later that day.
Despite the problems, the SIFF has shown its intentions of becoming a real international film festival with its gaggle of international nominees, a high-profile panel, and famous guest stars.
But the festival has film fans wondering whether it will stand the test of time.
"A real international film festival is much more than just awarding foreign films and directors," said Qiu Qiu, a local film buff.
The Hollywood-based Chinese actor, Jet Li, gave his enigmatic hopes for the 13-year-old Chinese film festival at an earlier press conference for his new feature film Ocean Heaven.
"I hope the SIFF will seem more like a film festival in the near future," Li said.
