How Wolf Totem director overcame China's blacklist
French director Jean-Jacques Annaud was persona non grata for a film about Tibet for years, but all that changed when he was approached to make his latest film
Jean-Jacques Annaud becomes animated when he talks of , his film about Chen Zhen, a young man sent to Inner Mongolia to teach local people the Chinese language during the Cultural Revolution.
Shot on location with a cast composed mainly of Mongolian and Chinese actors and actresses, the film is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Jiang Rong (the pen name of Lu Jiamin). In the book, the transplanted Beijinger (played in the film by Feng Shaofeng) comes to learn much from the Mongols and the wolves of the grasslands, such as the fragility of the environment.
The book resonated with the French filmmaker. "As a young man I was sent to Cameroon, also [like 's protagonist] in 1967 - not to teach language, but cinema. So I immediately related to the book's character. And the relationship with the animal, that's what I consider the essential balance between animal and man," he says.
Annaud had made two previous films with strong nature-and-man themes: (1988) and (2004), and 's story was one he wanted to put on film. But Annaud assumed it would be a pipe dream as he had been blacklisted by the Chinese government since 1997, when , his film based on Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer's account of his experiences in Tibet between 1944 and 1951, was banned on the mainland.
Seemingly from out of the blue, however, representatives from the Beijing Forbidden City Film company approached him in Paris about making the film. "I said in the past I have not been welcomed in China, but they smiled and said, 'We're changing. We are practical people, we need you,'" he recalls about the 2007 conversation that got him involved with 's production.
