Director Lou Ye Punished by Chinese Authorities
by Andre Soares
Director Lou Ye has been banned from making films in China for five years for submitting the psychological-political drama Yihe yuan / Summer Palace for this year’s Cannes Film Festival without government approval.
Summer Palace, the tale of a country girl who is exposed to subversive political ideas (i.e., democracy) at the university in Beijing, is set around the time of the deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Further horrifying the Chinese government’s powers-that-be, Ye’s film also features explicit sex scenes. (In addition to learning about urban politics, the country girl also discovers the multifaceted pleasures of urban sex.)
More on the Summer Palace ban at the BBC
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3 Responses to “Director Lou Ye Punished by Chinese Authorities”
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I hope he expatriates. For some reason people seem to think that Communism ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall but it is still very real and oppressing people all over the world, especially in China. But now that Communism is not longer a hot political topic it simply isn’t addressed as much as it should be. After all in the western world people of the same sex getting married is far more pressing than Communism. Unless of course gay Communists start applying for marriage licenses.
Marcus,
I can see your point, though I believe the issue is less about Communism — as much an economic system as a political system — than it is about just good plain old dictatorships, no matter their ideology, doing their best to survive.
China is not quite a Communist country anymore, but it remains a dictatorship through and through. (At times, with the assistance of big businesses from overseas, including Google and Microsoft.)
More details can be found in this “Guardian” article:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,,1506602,00.html
I guess Maoism is bigger that Communism but it’ll stay that way as long as “Made in China” means cheap labor. China wasn’t exactly the most free or just society before the current government. The current state of the nation is something that is as built up in time and tradition as ideology. Kind of sad that the film makers more or less have to escape from their nation to really express creativity. But what’s even more disappointing is western support of the wrong revolutions.