3 Chinese filmmakers win new Brilliant Stars awards
BERLIN: Three Chinese filmmakers have won the inaugural Asian Brilliant Stars (ABS) awards at the ongoing Berlin International Film Festival.
Xu Haofeng received the best director award for helming The Master; writer Liu Zhenyun won the best screenwriting recognition for the film Someone to Talk To, while Ye Ning with Chinese entertainment firm Huayi Brothers has won the best producer award for his work in The Wasted Times.
For the first time, the Berlin International Film Festival had set up an exclusive award section for Asian films to highlight Asian movies and demonstrate the profound cultural heritage and social values of Asia.
Xu is known for pioneering a new direction in filmmaking in China.
In a previous interview, he had noted: “My days in Beijing Film Academy witnessed a huge change of taste: from appreciating the French New Wave and Russian poetic cinema into a chase of Hollywood blockbusters. After my graduation, every film studio in China was talking about commercial films while the previous practice was to achieve decent breakthroughs in terms of the film art.”
Xu had adapted his novels into a trilogy of movies culminating with The Final Master. On whether adaptation was a difficult process, Xu said: “Actually, for me this is a very
After my graduation, every film studio in China was talking about commercial films while the previous practice was to achieve decent breakthroughs in terms of the film art.
interesting process because I was a film school student learning filming and directing in the past. In that process, writers and directors were educated together. If the writer and the director are two separate people, what will happen most of the time is they will definitely have different perspectives and views and understanding of different things, so that is why there will be a lot of conflict and also compromises through the process. But for me, because I am the writer and director, that makes it easier and I don’t really have to deal with those kind of conflicting results.”
The ABS is a joint initiative of organisations including Asian Film & Television Promotion, European Shooting Stars and the Beijing Film Academy, and it is supported by the Berlin International Film Festival committee.
Meanwhile, Chinese-language film The Foolish Bird also premiered at the Berlin event. Directed by Chinese filmmaker Huang Ji and her Japanese husband Ryuji Otsuka, the movie tells the story of a teenage girl in rural China as her parents have left for the big city to find work.
Director Huang Ji said the story mirrors her own experience growing up as a “leftbehind” child.
This is not the first time that the directing couple has explored the theme of “coming of age” among rural children whose parents are absent.
Their previous collaboration Egg and Stone, also about the life of a teenage girl in a Chinese village, took home the highest Tiger Award at the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Xu Haofeng, director