News

Filmmaker Lu Chuan, perhaps the most prominent Chinese commercial filmmaker visiting Cannes this year, will touch down on the Côte d’Azur Saturday to shop three new projects — one finished documentary, one nearly complete sci-fi thriller in need of a global distributor, and an all-new drama feature seeking a U.S. co-production partner.

Lu is best known to the industry for his acclaimed early features Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2004) and City of Life and Death (2009), as well as adventure blockbuster Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015) and the big-budget documentary he made for Disney and China Film Group, Born in China (2016).

He’ll arrive in Cannes with an early cut of Beijing 2022, the official documentary of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games that he directed with Chinese industry titan Zhang Yimou as executive producer. For the film, Lu was given unprecedented access to Beijing officials as they deliberated how to hold the Games...

Chinese director reveals the challenges of making the Winter Games documentary.

Amsterdam and Beijing-based Fortissimo Films has scored international rights to Lu Chuan’s Olympics documentary Beijing 2022 and is launching sales at the European Film Market.

Shot over more than two years, the official film of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing goes behind the scenes to share the stories of international and Chinese athletes, volunteers, medical personnel and officials – against the backdrop of a global pandemic.

An international team extended coverage to the US, France, Belgium, Austria and beyond to record the preparation of athletes. More than 1,200 hours...

Zhang Zhao, the former CEO and chairman of Le Chuang Entertainment, previously known as Le Vision Pictures, died of cancer on Wednesday. He was 58.

Known as a businessman with an artist’s temperament, Zhang was one of the most film influential execs thanks to a storied career in which he laid the foundation for much of China’s industry as it stands today. He successively founded Enlight Pictures in 2006 and Le Vision Pictures in 2011, going on to sign a roster of big-name directors to the latter that included Zhang Yimou, Lu Chuan, Tsui Hark and Guo Jingming.

As a producer, he was best known for his work on Zhang Yimou’s Matt Damon-starring US-China co-production “The Great Wall,” family drama “Coming Home,” and arthouse actioner “Shadow,” as well as Guo’s infamous, lucrative saga of the young and beautiful, “Tiny Times.”

“In his life and his career, Zhang Zhao embodied,...

We're pleased to debut the U.S. trailer for Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe, which takes a somewhat different approach to the latest film from Lu Chuan. The director debuted in 2002 with The Missing Gun, a terse and tense drama, and then moved on to the ambitious adventure Kekexili: Mountain Patrol. He received widespread international acclaim for the historical tragedy, City of Life and Death, before making the historical action picture The Last Supper. So a science-fiction adventure sounds like quite a departure for him. Here's the official synopsis for Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe: The Mongolian Border, 1979: Massive fossils of unknown creatures are discovered in the mountains, and the research team assigned to excavate the remains includes acclaimed Professor Yang (Wang Qingxiang), Hu Bayi...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

The Chinese director of local box office hit Chronicles Of The Ghostly Tribe is attached to direct and produce Peter Hessler’s memoir.

Tristine Skyler adapted the screenplay and Jamie Gordon and Courtney Potts of Fugitive Films are producing.

River Town chronicles a celebrated American writer’s journey to China for the Chinese publication of his first book as he recalls events 20 years earlier when he was a teacher in a country on the brink of huge change.

Development financing on the project is provided by Dragon Summit Culture in association with Ibp and Crystal City Entertainment.

Zhao Jin, Cleo Lee and Jonathan Rubenstein serve as co-executive producers on the project.

Chuan’s credits include San Sebastian Golden Shell-winner City Of Life And Death, as well as The Missing Gun, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, and The Last Supper.

He is currently in post-production on Born In China for Disneynature, which will open in China and the Us in April...

One of China's more interesting young directors, Lu Chuan has revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he will be collaborating with Hollywood visual effects company Prime Focus on his latest directorial venture.Prime Focus is one of the biggest VFX houses in town, and their resume includes some of this year's biggest hits, including Guardians of the Galaxy, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Edge of Tomorrow, not to mention the likes of Gravity, The Great Gatsby and Tron: Legacy. Lu Chuan is best known for his stunning black and white war drama City of Life and Death, as well as Kekexili: Mountain Patrol and 2012's period thriller The Last Supper. His latest project is an as-yet untitled sci-fi adventure, and in a recent interview with THR he...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

One of China’s most celebrated younger film directors Lu Chuan hailed the rise of the film market in his home country, but said he was worried that there was not enough focus on content in the current frenzy. Lu is best known overseas for his 2004 thriller set among hunters on the Tibetan plateau, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol and his elegiac black-and-white feature about the Japanese army’s massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanjing during WWII, City of Life and Death (2009). He also scored critical plaudits with 2012's The Last Supper. Photos: Johnny Depp's First Trip to China “For me, I think

read more...

Chinese director Lu Chuan presented his first film at Venice, received the top prize at Taiwan’s Golden Horses with his second, and won the Golden Shell award at San Sebastian with his third film.

With such start, I’d say he can only ascend further, and the films are quite a proof of his boldness when choosing theme and setting for them – as he goes from an urban thriller (The Missing Gun, 2002) to a thriller set among hunters on the Tibetan plateau (Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, 2004) to a black-and-white feature about the Japanese army’s massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanjing during the Second World War (City of Life and Death, 2009).

And then there’s The Last Supper. The story follows Liu Bang (played by Liu Ye), the first emperor of China’s Han Dynasty. It’s a typical story of how an uncultured, uneducated brute grabs power, basks in its excess,...

Release Date: Oct. 25, 2011

Price: 2-disc DVD $29.95, 2-disc Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Kino

The horrors of the Rape of Nanking are chronicled in The City of Life and Death.

The Chinese epic film The City of Life and Death, a depiction of the Rape of Nanking, is based on the recorded witness testimony from the real-life survivors of the  infamous reign of terror conducted by the occupying Japanese army in the Chinese capital of Nanking in 1937.

Directed by Lu Chuan (Mountain Patrol), the strikingly photographed black-and-white film is the first big-budget fiction film by the Chinese to deal with the event.

The City of Life and Death is filled with an ensemble of conflicted characters caught in the crossfire, including Chinese officer Lu (Liu Ye), who leads his men in a hopeless, defiant resistance effort; the German businessman, John Rabe (John Paisley), who establishes a safety zone in an attempt to protect civilians...

In this isle of Britain we seem to be obsessed with regional dialects. We construct opinions based on the sounds and cadences they form. Stereotypes can be derived from even a simple “hullo”. A Liverpudlian accent makes you a thief, a Birmingham accent means you are dull/dim witted, a London accent makes you a geezer! The region and strength of the enunciation can make your brain subconsciously decide whether the accused speaker is friend or foe. This makes delivery of vocabulary in these alternate timbres very powerful. As such, we prize these intonations in language very dearly.

So, it was no surprise to me when the people of the United Kingdom were so vehemently offended about a story regarding an American actress trying and failing to replicate the intricate tones of a much cherished regional drawl, made it on to BBC national news, -far beyond the vales and boundaries...

"Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death has the title and the feel of a monument," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "This widescreen, austerely monochromatic, two-hour-plus collective drama — depicting the worst indignity inflicted by foreigners on modern China, as well as the most terrible atrocity in the run-up to World War II — might have been hewed from rock and colored by soot."

Further in, he notes that the film "frequently, if superficially, adopts a Japanese point of view, something that evidently infuriated a sizable chunk of the Chinese audience. (The movie would have been pulled from theaters after one week were it not for the protection of the Communist Party's chief propagandist; although a popular hit, it received no official awards.) On the festival circuit since 2009, the film has been well-received by foreign critics, recognizing a historical epic in the Griffith-Lean-Spielberg tradition."

This reception bugs Michael Joshua Rowin, writing...

When Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death won the top prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival two years ago, it was a testament not only to the emotional resonance and technical mastery of his widescreen black-and-white epic, which dramatizes the infamous 1937 Nanjing massacre at the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, but a tacit acknowledgment of the film’s daring revisionist ambitions. A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, Lu had previously directed a small-scale crime thriller, Missing Gun, and the critically well received Kekexili, Mountain Patrol, a rural drama about efforts to stop antelope poachers that screened at Sundance and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Tokyo Film Festival. But the latest film by this talented 40-year-old writer-director, the result of years of research and toil, has a depth of feeling that far surpasses his previous efforts.

While previous homegrown films about the massacre (Dont...

There are times you go into a screening, nervous that high hopes will leave you disappointed.  (Case in point: Tron Legacy.)  The Way Back is a movie that seemed to be tailor made for me given the curious topics which hold me in strange fascination.  Luckily, Peter Weir, his Dp Russell Boyd, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Saoirse Ronan and Mark Effing Strong delivered what I wanted, making this a picture I love dearly.

Reason for wanting to love The Way Back A:

It is not uncommon, in a Jewish family or with Jewish friends, to meet older relatives who survived concentration camps.  My very good friend, however, has a Great Uncle (still alive, I believe) born in the part of Poland that, after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, came under Soviet rule.  When Russia went to war with Germany, you'd think that the Kremlin would be smart enough to...

Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death will finally receive its theatrical release and it won't be via the National Geographic folks who originally picked up the film in 2009, but never released the film due to circumstances that appeared to fall into a grey zone. Kino International have grabbed the rights and have set the pic up with a May 11th release at Film Forum. Gist: A box office smash back at home, this is the epic tale of the defiance of the citizens who survive the horrors of the 1937 Japanese occupation of China’s capital Nanjing. The Chinese soldiers, civilians, women and children, along with courageous American and European sympathizers – based on real personalities – bravely fight to persevere and live when it would have been so much easier for them to accept defeat and death. Worth Noting: The subject matter acts very much like a continual source for silver-screen.

Beijing – Sitting in his sparsely-decorated corner office in a glass-and-steel high rise in the Beijing’s central business district, Stellar Group chairman Qin Hong proclaims, “There will be another Avatar in China and it’ll be another Hollywood film, but in two to three years' time, a Chinese film will do as much business in China as Avatar.”

By grossing $207 million in China alone this year (second only to its U.S. take), Avatar became China’s biggest box office hit of all time.

However, as the majority investor in upcoming films from three of China’s top directors -- Chen Kaige’s Sacrifice, just out this week; Peter Chan’s Wu Xia, now shooting with Donnie Yen and Takeshi Kaneshiro; and Kekexili director Lu Chuan’s first ancient war epic, King’s Feast, due out next fall – Stellar and Qin could eventually back the Avatar-killer

Stellar handles film production,...

Restrepo is currently one of the highest reviewed films of the year, sitting at 97% with nearly 100 reviews on RottenTomatoes and recently garnered as a final selection for the documentary Oscar category. We have partnered with Virgil Films & Entertainment and National Geographic Entertainment to give away three Blu-ray copies to our readers!

For a chance to win one of the three Blu-rays just fill out the form below by 11:59 Pm Est on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010. We will select the winners at random and you will be notified by e-mail. One entry per household. No purchase necessary. Winners must live inside the U.S. Shipping to a P.O. box is not permitted. Check out more info regarding the film as well as a trailer below, after the submission form. Good luck!

[contact-form]

Presented by Virgil Films & Entertainment and National Geographic Entertainment

From Directors Tim Hetherington And Sebastian Junger

The Award-winning Documentary...

Nicolas Winding Refn seems to see Valhalla Rising as a tone poem of sorts, but the acclaimed Danish director's seventh feature film is more one long atonal scribble. A grim, brutally violent action drama about a Viking war party who accidentally stumble upon the New World a long time before Leif Ericsson carved himself a place in history, some impressive location shooting and a striking display of commitment to his role from star Mads Mikkelsen can't make up for a general lack of substance and a pervading air of seriousness so unrelenting it borders on farce.

Mikkelsen plays One-Eye, a fearsome warrior, mute and scarred, held captive by a mountain clan who employ his capacity for emotionless savagery in gladiatorial contests where One-Eye's jailers earn a steady stream of money off his ability to make sure his opponents leave the ring feet-first. When a chance opportunity leads to One-Eye escaping slavery,...

• #17. City Of Life And Death Director: Lu Chuan Cast:Liu Ye, Hideo Nakaizumi, Fan Wei, John Paisley, Gao Yuanyuan, Yuko MiyamotoDistributor: National Geographic Films. Buzz: Those who've seen Kekexili: Mountain Patrol won't need an introduction to the filmmaker, but for the rest of yous, he is one of the better Chinese filmmakers around. Epic scaled film should receive one of the top 5 nomination spots for the Best Foreign picture.   The Gist: Filmed in B&W, this is about the 1937 massacre of Nanking by the Japanese army.      Tiff Schedule: Click here for screening times   ...

...

• If you ask me, National Geographic Entertainment's pick up of the North American rights to City of Life and Death may have to do with a pre-established partnership with helmer Lu Chuan. Nge had teamed with the filmmaker on the N-American release the miraculous Kekexili: Mountain Patrol – a tale that pitted a band of vigilante rangers versus a gang of antelope hunters with Range Rovers as the mode of transport. The film showcased the filmmakers talent for using a sparse and difficult backdrop - something the National Geographic folks know all too well. The war epic was rumored as a possible selection for the Cannes Competition, but will instead receive it's international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. The Hollywood Reporter mentions that the pic was released in April in China, where it has grossed nearly $26 million. The film will be released late this year or in early 2010. Filmed in B&W,

...

National Geographic Entertainment has acquired North American rights to "City of Life and Death," produced, written and directed by Lu Chuan.

Set during the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937, "City" will screen at September's Toronto International Film Festival. It was released in April in China, where it has grossed nearly $26 million.

The film's cast includes Liu Ye, Fan Wei, Hideo Nakaizumi, Gao Yuanyuan, Qin Lan and Jiang Yiyan, and co-stars Ryuichi Kohata, Yao Di, Zhao Yisui and Yuko Miyamoto.

The acquisition reunites Lu with National Geographic, which co-distributed his "Moutain Patrol: Kekexili" with Samuel Goldwyn Films in 2006.

Nge will coordinate marketing of "City" with Idg China Media Fund, part of International Data Group, a U.S. venture capital company. The film will be released late this year or in early 2010.

"City" was produced by Han Sanping, Qin Hong, Zhou Li, John Chong and Andy Zhang, with Lu serving as exec producer.

• An indication that Atom Egoyan's Chloe will most definitely find a competition slot in Venice, Tiff has uncharacteristically went with a foreign English language title as the film festival's opening night selection. The spot usually reserved for a Canadian film went to Jon Amiel's unsold Creation which will have its world premiere on the 10th of September. Today's announcement of 23 titles confirms the a.) red carpet presence and early seat sale interest with names/faces like Matt Damon, Ricky Gervais, Clive Owen and Michael Douglas, b.) the latest from Bruno Dumont, Niki Caro, Neil Jordan and Tim Blake Nelson will not be receiving comp slots in Venice but will be part of the Special Presentations at Tiff instead, and c.) a sampling of adult fair titles (Solitary Man, Valhalla Rising, The Boys Are Back, Mao’s Last Dancer, Moloch Tropical, Cracks) that were perhaps not ready or

...

SHANGHAI -- When Oscar-winner Anthony Minghella was just 12 years old, he wrote the Chinese Embassy, politely asking a few questions about the Cultural Revolution, a political movement that had just been launched in 1966 and would become one of the deadliest in recorded history. "I heard there had been a revolution in culture and I wanted to know more," Minghella said Wednesday, the humor of his naivete lost in translation on the crowd at the Shanghai International Film Festival. In reply, the future director of The English Patient got a package of the writings of Chairman Mao and a sheaf of propaganda calling England "a horrible capitalist place." At the festival, Minghella joined rising stars Lu Chuan, whose Kekexili is about Chinese poaching rare Tibetan antelopes, and Xu Jinglei, an actress turned director whose blog is wildly popular with Chinese worldwide, for a session moderated by a China Central Television hostess. Minghella hinted that he heard echoes today of the Cultural Revolution that, from 1966-1976, shut China's film industry and turned artists into propagandists for the state.

SHANGHAI -- When Oscar-winner Anthony Minghella was just 12 years old, he wrote the Chinese Embassy, politely asking a few questions about the Cultural Revolution, a political movement that had just been launched in 1966 and would become one of the deadliest in recorded history. "I heard there had been a revolution in culture and I wanted to know more," Minghella said Wednesday, the humor of his naivete lost in translation on the crowd at the Shanghai International Film Festival. In reply, the future director of The English Patient got a package of the writings of Chairman Mao and a sheaf of propaganda calling England "a horrible capitalist place." At the festival, Minghella joined rising stars Lu Chuan, whose Kekexili is about Chinese poaching rare Tibetan antelopes, and Xu Jinglei, an actress turned director whose blog is wildly popular with Chinese worldwide, for a session moderated by a China Central Television hostess. Minghella hinted that he heard echoes today of the Cultural Revolution that, from 1966-1976, shut China's film industry and turned artists into propagandists for the state.

BEIJING -- Director Chen Kaige's latest movie, The Promise, will be China's official submission to the Academy Awards as best foreign language film, a Film Bureau spokesman said Monday. The newest swordplay fantasy from the director of the 1994 Oscar-nominee Farewell My Concubine is the most expensive Chinese film made to date, with a reported budget of $35 million. Produced by state-run China Film Group, The Promise is due to be released worldwide in December. It beat out the independent film Kekexili for Beijing's Oscar run and comes as China's historically state-dominated film industry tries to become more commercially viable in the face of increasing foreign and domestic independent competition.

HONG KONG -- The second Hong Kong Asian Film Financing Forum has announced 28 projects, including some from a number of established directors from around the Asian region, as part of the Entertainment Expo to take place March 22-April 6. Among the directors who will be presenting projects at HAF, which will be held concurrently with the FILMART programming trade show (March 22-26), are Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe), Hong Kong's Ann Hui (Summer Snow) and Lo Chi-leung (Inner Senses), and Mainland Chinese directors Lu Chuan, who recently won Taiwan's Golden Horse Award for Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, and Jiang Wen (Devil at My Doorstep).