China is a vast country, and one not to be messed with. When it stops you on the streets of Shanghai and says "Hey, you buy this best quality Rolex," you do it, and when it tells you not to enter films in Cannes, you don't.
Sadly, Chinese film director Lou Ye didn't listen to the Chinese government earlier this year, and submitted his film to the Cannes film festival without seeking its approval first. Now Lou Ye has been banned from making films for five years by the Chinese government, we can't help thinking: is there anyway we could fit Michael Bay up with a similar punishment?
The biggest story of this year's Cannes film festival had to be all the Hollywood megastars desperately trying to polish the Da Vinci Code turd as hard as they could to no avail, but behind the scenes a much less amusing spectacle was taking place; Chinese director Lou Ye had entered his movie Summer Palace to the festival without clearing it beforehand with Chinese censors.
Summer Palace is apparently a romance – complete with explicit sex scenes – set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, meaning that when the Chinese government heard that Lou Ye had been punting it around to the tanned starlets and grouchy journalists of Cannes, it hit the flipping roof. Lou Ye must have been expecting some kind of trouble from Summer Palace, since his last movie – Suzhou River – was banned in China after it won first prize at the Rotterdam film festival, but his punishment this time around has been far more severe – Lou Ye has been banned from making films for five years, as the official Chinese state news agency reports:
"A senior official with SARFT (the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) confirmed the punishment to Xinhua on Monday but refused to discuss the case further."
It doesn't take a genius what's going to happen next; and we're very much looking forward to watching the new Lou Ye movie Five Years? You Bunch Of Fucking Arseholes when it comes out in 2011.
Read more:
China imposes 5-year ban on Chinese film maker Lou Ye – Reuters
[story by Stuart Heritage]
