Photo:VCG

Chinese netizens flooded social media platforms to congratulate Chinese director Zhao Ting, also known as Chloe Zhao, who on Sunday won the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, making her the second woman, and the only Asian woman, to win the award.

The 39-year-old director has won a lot of honors and made many breakthroughs with her film Nomadland at several film festivals, including winning the Golden Lion at the 2020 Venice Film Festival and the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The hashtag "Zhao wins Golden Globe Awards" has earned 210 million views on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo as of Monday afternoon. 

Many Chinese netizens hailed Zhao's win as an inspiration for young women, particularly those pursuing the arts.

"We are so proud of Zhao Ting! She is making history by being the second woman to win in this category in the Golden Globe Awards' entire 78-year history!" one Chinese netizen wrote on Sina Weibo. 

"She and Jia Ling are telling the world that women also have talent as filmmakers," another netizen posted on Sina Weibo.

Jia, the Chinese director of the 2021 hit film Hi, Mom, has taken No.3 spot on the list of the world's highest-earning independent female directors. 

Although the film Nomadland has indeed earned high reviews in the West, some Chinese film experts told the Global Times that its box office performance in the Chinese film market may not be ideal as the story is a pure US story and so will be hard to understand for Chinese audiences.

"I am not very optimistic about the domestic box office of this movie because the film does not have much drama and it runs against the tastes of the mainsteam audience in China," Xiao Fuqiu, a film critic based in Shanghai, told the Global Times on Monday.

According to Xiao, the charm of Nomadland mainly comes from the cinematography, such as exquisite ambient and empty shots which are used to understand a character's mental state. However, the film does not have a particularly sophisticated story, and the character's emotions it presents are relatively restrained, which might cause some layers of cultural differences among Chinese audience.

This movie is indeed very "American." For many Chinese audiences, they may see "RV Wandering" as a "romantic" poetic life, and so it may be difficult for them to understand the protagonist's "hard" and "homeless" situation as well as the logic behind her thinking.

"Even though the film might win awards at the upcoming Oscars, it will be difficult to achieve the box-office success of Green Book as Green Book is exactly the type of good story that mainstream audiences like."

Nomadland has been confirmed to be released in the Chinese mainland on April 23, according to Maoyan.