LouYe Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Indie Bites: Tiananmen Square, 'Ben X,' and Some Latin 'Rabia'
Filed under: Drama », Foreign Language », Independent », Casting », Deals », Scripts », Distribution », Cinematical Indie »
For your hump day:- Back in September of 2006, Lou Ye was banned from making films in China for 5 years because of Summer Palace, a film that mixed the Tiananmen Square massacre with a sexually explicit love story. Without China's permission, he'd screened the movie at Cannes and had scored himself another filmmaking ban (he'd previously had one for Suzhou River). Now the film is getting new life through Palm Pictures, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The company has picked up the North American theatrical and DVD rights, planning to release the film in late January. According to Palm, Ye can still do publicity for the film, and I guess his lust isn't getting stopped by caution.
- Nic Balthazar's Ben X has been riding the waves of success. It scored the top prize at Montreal's film fest this year, and is also Belgium's candidate for the foreign-language Oscar. To top that off, Variety reports that the director is planning to make an English-language remake of the film, which he will adapt into an American setting. The plan is to get a distributor and private investors to bring together the picture, with a budget between $8 and $12 million. X is about a mildly autistic teen who is withdrawn in real life and a warrior in online fantasy games, and I imagine it could be a pretty popular movie if they right people become involved.
- Finally, there's a new, Spanish social thriller on the way called Rabia, according to Variety. To be headed by Ecuadorian director Sebastian Cordero, the film will focus on "an immigrant couple who fall in love in a hostile mileu. Jose Maria, a construction worker, kills his foreman, and hides for a long time at the mansion where his girlfriend, Rosa, serves as a maid." While this may just sound like your ordinary thriller, there's a few things going for it. Actors Gustavo Sánchez Parra (Amores perros) and Leonor Watling (Paris, je t'aime) are attached, and the film comes from a book by Sergio Bizzio, who wrote the story on which the great XXY was based.
Chinese Filmmaker Gets Five-Year Ban
Filed under: Drama », Foreign Language », Cannes », Politics », Cinematical Indie »
Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye did a bad, bad thing. He showed his movie Summer Palace at Cannes earlier this year, and he did so without permission from the Chinese government. Now the director is not permitted to make another film in his home country for five years. Sure, for some filmmakers (like Terrence Malick and the late Stanley Kubrick, were he alive), this wouldn't be that horrible a punishment, except that the whole consequence part includes the government's confiscation of the film and seizing of any income it has generated. Lou Ye has already been the victim of a filmmaking ban; he made Suzhou River without the authorization to do so in 2000 and then couldn't make another film for two years. The producer of Summer Palace, An Nai, has also been put on a five-year suspension.Summer Palace is a sexually explicit film set in 1989 amidst that year's pro-democracy demonstrations, which ended with the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre. And, according to Lou, it is somewhat autobiographical. Now, while you may be happy to not be living in a communist country, like Lou Ye, surely there are some directors out there that you wish could be given such a ban. My pick: Shawn Levy.
[via Fark.com]
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