Film by China’s Zhang Yimou withdrawn from Berlin festival competition days before its world premiere
- Zhang is China’s best known filmmaker, and highly unusual move comes amid sharper government scrutiny of entertainment sector
- ‘Technical difficulties encountered during post-production’ cited by organisers for pulling of One Second, about a prisoner in the Cultural Revolution
The Berlin film festival says a new movie by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou has been pulled from the competition days before its scheduled world premiere.
The highly unusual move, which comes amid a Beijing crackdown on the domestic entertainment industry, was announced in a festival statement citing “technical difficulties encountered during post-production”.
Shock in China after Cultural Revolution film pulled from Berlin festival
Zhang’s Yi miao zhong (One Second) had been scheduled to screen on Friday. It is billed as an intimate portrait of a prisoner who escaped from a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution and is on a trek to see a key newsreel in a rural village cinema.
The film’s press material noted that Zhang himself “was sent to the country as a young man during the Cultural Revolution, an experience he has explored in many of his films”.
“In Yi Miao Zhong, the filmmaker pays homage to his medium and celebrates the cinema as a communal experience which goes beyond the film itself,” it said.
The Berlinale festival, one of Europe’s top cinema showcases, said it would show an earlier Zhang film instead, 2002’s Hero, and that the competition for the Golden Bear top prize would now only feature 16 titles.
