Source: ChinaFile (3/8/19)
Here’s How the Trade War Is Affecting Hollywood
By Ying Zhu

(China Photos/Getty Images) An audience watches a 3D movie at an IMAX theater in Wuhan, Hubei province, February 8, 2007.

In February 2017, the United States and China began renegotiating the five-year film pact that had limited the annual number of foreign film exports to China to 34 and the share of revenue payable to foreign-rights holders to 25 percent of gross box office. Hollywood wanted an increase in revenue-sharing films, a higher share of box-office receipts, and more access to key viewing windows in China’s ever-expanding film market. In January 2018, Beijing agreed to discuss “policies and practices that may impede the U.S. film industry’s access to China’s market,” and in April Chinese negotiators reportedly offered to raise annual quotas. But then the talks stalled amidst the contentious U.S.-China trade negotiations. And now, the same trade dynamics affecting products as diverse as soybeans and auto parts have hit Hollywood. Continue reading How the trade war is affecting Hollywood →

Source: The New Yorker (3/6/19)
“An Elephant Sitting Still,” Reviewed: A Young Chinese Filmmaker’s Masterly Portrait of Political and Intimate Despair
By Richard Brody

Hu Bo, the director of “An Elephant Sitting Still,” is as much a documentarian as he is an aesthete. Photograph Courtesy KimStim

“An Elephant Sitting Still,” the 2017 film by the Chinese director Hu Bo that’s being released this Friday, is one of the greatest recent films; its mighty ambition and mighty power are suggested by its unusual length (it runs nearly four hours) and its distinctive, original style and tone. Yet it’s rooted in a familiar kind of story, a tale of the sort that lesser filmmakers could easily dramatize in familiar ways but which Hu expanded into a vision of life.

The movie, set in a grim and decrepit industrial town in northern China, is centered on a conflict among older high-school students, all around seventeen: a boy named Yu Shuai (Zhang Xiaolong) accuses another, Li Kai (Ling Zhenghui), of stealing his cell phone. Li’s best friend, a boy named Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang), comes to his defense. In a resulting hallway fight, Wei accidentally yet nonetheless gravely injures Yu Shuai, whose older brother, Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), a local minor gangster, plots revenge, and Wei plots his escape. Continue reading An Elephant Sitting Still review →

I can think of a few other Chinese science fiction films not mentioned in the article (not including films from Hong Kong). What am I missing?

Transcendent 《镜像人·明日青春》, d. Zhang Linzi, 2018
The Htrae 《异星》, Will Jung, 2007
Save Love 《拯救愛情》, Lin Xin, 2001
Dislocation 《錯位》, Huang Jianxin, 1987

Shelly Kraicer <shellyk@mac.com>

Source: NYT (2/4/19)
China’s Film Industry Finally Joins the Space Race
By Steven Lee Myers

Wu Jing in a scene from “The Wandering Earth.” The actor contributed money to the budget.CreditCreditChina Film Group

BEIJING — China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. That is about to change.

The country’s first blockbuster set in space, “The Wandering Earth,” opens Tuesday amid grandiose expectations that it will represent the dawning of a new era in Chinese filmmaking.

It is one in a series of ambitious, big-budget films tackling a genre that, until now, has been beyond the reach of most filmmakers here — technically and financially. Those movies include “Shanghai Fortress,” about an alien attack on Earth, and “Pathfinder,” about a spaceship that crashes on a desert planet. Continue reading Film industry joins the space race →