That's the feeling some audiences may have after watching Chinese director Zhang Yimou's film One Second. 

Removed from the Berlin Film Festival and China's Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival line ups due to "technical issues", film One Second was finally released in Chinese mainland theaters on Friday. 

Set in Northwest China's Gansu Province during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the film tells the story of an escaped prisoner named Zhang Jiusheng who desperately wants to find a newsreel that contains just one second of footage of his daughter and a homeless vagabond girl named Liu Guinü who wants to steal the same film to make a lampshade (a very popular decoration in the mid-1970s) for her younger brother.

The film currently has a high score of 7.9/10 on Chinese major media review platform Douban. However, this high score has not been reflected in its box office, which reached 61.22 million yuan ($9.3 million) as of Sunday afternoon, according to Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan. This could very well be because the film cannot escape its nature of being an art film. 

At a press conference in Beijing, the 70-year-old director said that he wanted to shoot the film to pay tribute to the age of physical film while he still had the physical strength to shoot in the desert and have the funding to shoot an art film. 

Watching a movie in the Chinese mainland during the 1970s was an event akin to celebrating Chinese New Year for many. In remote desert areas, people had a strong desire to watch films. They also had a great deal of respect for film projectionists, which can be reflected in a scene from the film in which film projectionist Fan Dianying instructs residents on how to clean a film strip after it was dropped and dragged a few miles through the dirt.

When Fan announces that the film strip has been fixed and the film can be watched, the people in the auditorium cheer and applaud, which demonstrates people's passion for film in that era. 

These people's mood was similar to the excitement Chinese movie lovers felt after they learned that cinemas in the mainland were going to reopen in July after a nearly six-month shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems that watching movies in cinemas has been a ritual in China for a long time. Many netizens took notice of this, saying in reviews for the film that it has reminded them of the importance of watching movies in cinemas rather than through streaming platforms. 

"A good film should be watched in theaters, that's the tradition from the older generations and cannot be changed," one Chinese netizen wrote on Zhihu, China's Quora-like Q&A platform. 

Compared with the discussion of the film in China, many foreign media outlets have only maliciously focused on conjecture concerning how the current version, which is one minute shorter than the run time listed for its Berlin debut, has been changed.    

However, Chinese audiences have already shown great tolerance for any revisions, saying that the new version is a complete version that can be discussed on its own merit. 

Some film insiders told the Global Times that they really appreciate the director's excellent skill in dealing with the background of the Cultural Revolution and how it was melded into the story and the characters. 

As any filmmaker knows, editing a film - be it for commercial or other reasons - to fit the market is just part of the job.

Source: By Gong Qian Source: Global Times Published: 2020/11/29 22:26:27 

Local media said 40 workers had been laid off from i-Cable, including the entire team from the station’s award-winning investigative section, News Lancet.

i-Cable told Reuters the restructure “does not have anything to do with media censorship”.

“In the face of daunting challenges, the group has devoted to adopting various measures to explore new business opportunities for competitiveness enhancement and sustainable development,” the station said in a statement, adding that about 100 positions among the group’s 1,300 staff would be affected.

“Under this circumstance, after a comprehensive review, it was unavoidable for the group to carry out an organizational restructure of various departments.”

The pay TV station did not say how many had been sacked.

Wong Lai-ping, deputy chief of the station’s China News team, which covers human rights on the mainland and reported from Wuhan province on the coronavirus outbreak, told reporters she was among those laid off. Ten other members of the team had resigned in protest against the lay-offs, she added.

i-Cable journalists told Reuters the lay-offs had prompted the heads of the station’s China News, Hong Kong General News, Finance News and Editing desk to resign.

Yau Ting-leung, 22, a journalist from the News Lancet segment who said he was fired after about six months with the company, said he was skeptical of the reason behind the decision.

“It’s definitely media censorship. It’s a pity they sacked the entire team. There aren’t many TV investigative news programs in Hong Kong,” Yau said.

The former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997 with the guarantee of freedoms not enjoyed on the mainland, including freedom of speech. Protesters who took to the streets for months last year complain that Communist Party rulers in Beijing are whittling away at those freedoms, a charge Beijing denies.

The Hong Kong Journalists’ Association said it was watching the situation closely as media have already come under pressure in the wake of a new national security law introduced by Beijing on June 30.

“This time the whole ‘News Lancet’ team of Cable News was laid off and the team has often reported against/on the police or the regime in the past year,” HKJA said in a statement.

i-Cable was founded in 1993 and is now owned by David Chiu, chairman and CEO of Far East Consortium.

Source: Reuters; Reporting By Sharon Tam, Jessie Pang; Yanni Chow; Clare Jim, Donny Kwok, Joyce Zhou; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Nick Macfie

According to the federation, its board of directors selected the nominee from films released from October 2019 to December 2020 in Hong Kong, with "Better Days" winning the majority of votes.

Starring Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee, "Better Days" tells a couple of teenagers supporting each other in the face of school bullying and impoverished family condition before the heroine successfully attending Gaokao or the National College Entrance Examination.

The film garnered 1.5 billion yuan ($220 million) in the box office 45 days after it was released in the Chinese mainland in October 2019, making it into the top ten highest-grossing films of the year.

At the 39th Hong Kong Film Awards held earlier in May, it took home eight awards, including the best film, best director, best actress, and best new performer.

Source: CGTN

This is in the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan, back in January and February when the city of 11 million went into a 2 1/2-month lockdown and hospitals were overrun. The health worker’s father has just died, and her agony at not being able to sit by his side is overwhelming. Her colleagues restrain her as she sobs, moaning, “Papa, you’ll stay forever in my heart.” 

“76 Days,” shot in four Wuhan hospitals, captures a local horror before it became a global nightmare. Given the constraints at the time on footage and information from Wuhan, it’s a rare window into the infancy of the pandemic. The film is directed by the New York-based filmmaker Hao Wu, who worked with two Chinese journalists — one named Weixi Chen, the other is remaining anonymous — to create of a portrait of the virus epicenter.

Some of the images document the fear and confusion of those early days: A group of patients mill outside the hospital doors, pleading to be let in. Others are by now more familiar: Solitary deaths followed by phone calls to family members. 

“There has been so much news coverage and commentary about the pandemic but most of that has primarily been about statistics and our political divide,” Wu said in an interview. “What I think is missing is the human stories, the human faces of the pandemic.”

That may be especially true for stories of the pandemic from China, which President Donald Trump and his supporters have been highly critical of, blaming it for the “Wuhan virus.” Wu’s film, though, consciously avoids politics to concentrate on the humanity inside the hospitals — even if the workers are so obscured by their Hazmat suits that they’re only identifiable by the names penned in sharpie on their backs.

“I feel like right now there is such a toxic background to a lot of the discussions around the virus,” Wu says. “The virus is an enemy that doesn’t care about your nationality.”

“76 Days,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, is being released Friday by MTV Documentary Films is more than 50 virtual cinemas. Last month, it was nominated for best documentary by the IFP Gotham Awards.

It’s among the first in a coming surge of coronavirus documentaries. A handful have already arrived, some — snapshots in an ongoing drama — hurriedly edited even as the scope of the pandemic has continued to expand. In October, Alex Gibney released “Totally Under Control,” a two-part indictment of the federal U.S. response to the virus. In August, the artist-activist Ai Weiwei debuted “Coronation,” a documentary he directed remotely with dozens of volunteers to capture the lockdown experience for ordinary Chinese people.

For some, the films are too harsh a reminder of an all-consuming reality. But “76 Days” feels like a vital early draft of history. Wu’s first instinct had been to create a more straightforwardly journalistic film examining what happened in Wuhan. But Wu — a Chinese native who lives in New York with his partner and two children (he depicted his journey as a gay man in a traditional Chinese family in the 2019 Netflix documentary “All in My Family” ) — soon recognized the difficulty of access and the rapidly changing situation would make such a film either very difficult or potentially stale by the time it was finished.

“The images coming out of Wuhan were so harrowing. Everyone was scouring social media, trying to find out what happened in Wuhan, how it got so bad. A lot of us were so angry,” he says. “I started getting away from wanting to assign blame.”

The journalists, working with press passes, would have typically been closely watched by Communist party minders but in the chaos were given more free rein. Wu leaned into a more observational approach without talking heads, and urged his collaborators to focus on the people and the details. One poignant shot shows the ziplocked cell phone of a deceased person quietly ringing. 

Wu’s last trip to China was in January and February. Right after he came back, his grandfather was diagnosed with late stage liver cancer. He would die a month later. Wu, unable to visit because of travel restrictions and busy on the film, wasn’t able to say goodbye in person.

“For me, I was compelled to tell the story. It’s almost like a tribute to my grandfather,” says Wu. “The shots that attracted me were those that showed the details of people willing to be nice to each other. I guess it was guilty about not being able to say goodbye to my grandfather, to hold his hand.”

Source: Associated Press by Jake Coyle

The film follows the travails and triumphs of China's women's national volleyball team over a period of more than 40 years. Gong Li stars as legendary player-turned-coach Lang Ping, a member of the Chinese squad that won a Gold Medal over the United States at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. As a coach, she would later lead the Chinese team to gold medal glory at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

Leap's cast also includes ten out of the 12 Olympic Gold medalists from China's 2016 team appearing as themselves. Chinese leading man Huang Bo co-stars as Chen Zhonghe, who coached China's team from 2001-2009.

Produced by Lian Ray Pictures and Huanxi Media, Leap was originally scheduled to release during China's usually lucrative Lunar New Year holiday in January, but those plans were waylaid by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The film ended up not being able to open until the National Day holiday in late September. It went on to earn a healthy $127 million.

Leap has already received its share of honors at home in China. Just last weekend, the film won the prize for best feature at China's state-backed Golden Rooster Film Festival and Awards.

Chan, a Hong Kong film industry veteran, has won numerous prizes at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards (The Warlords, 2008) and the Hong Kong Film Awards (Comrades: Almost a Love Story, 1999). His 2005 film Perhaps Love was submitted for Oscars consideration on behalf of Hong Kong but failed to make the shortlist.

China has submitted films for consideration in the best foreign-language category since 1979. The country has won just two nominations, both for films directed by Zhang Yimou, Ju Dou (1990) and Hero (2002).

The nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards will be announced on March 13, 2021. The winners' ceremony will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on April 25, 2021.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter by Patrick Brzeski

Chinese authorities have issued new regulations to clamp down on live-streaming, one of the country’s most lucrative and fast-growing entertainment and e-commerce sectors, seeking to use AI and big data to promote only “positive” broadcasts in line with “core socialist values.”

An “intensive” clean-up campaign will be carried out between now and the end of the year, with companies that are unable to meet the new requirements shuttered, the National Radio and Television Administration said.

China is home to the earliest mass adopters of live-streaming, a form of entertainment in which vloggers pump out content in exchange for virtual gifts from fans. (Its early heyday was chronicled in indie filmmaker Wu Hao’s revealing doc “People’s Republic of Desire.”)

Around 560 million people watch live-streams in China as of March, according to the latest government data — a group larger than the entire U.S. population and more than quadruple the 126 million counted watching last June. Almost half of users were found to be watching e-commerce live-streams for online shopping.

Live-streamed e-commerce — a bit like a more Tik Tok-esque interactive version of the Home Shopping Network — began to emerge in China around 2016. Charismatic hosts flog products and discounts in real time, earning commissions on sales and receiving “rewards” from adoring viewers that host platforms paid out in cash.

The pandemic pushed the trend mainstream, as it shut down cinemas and gatherings but left the country’s diligent fleet of deliverymen on the go, serving new users who remained bored at home, glued to their phones. Last year, live-streamed e-commerce was estimated to be a nearly $70 billion industry in China. The Shanghai-based consultancy iResearch predicted in July that this year, it could more than double to around $170 billion. As the Chinese economy flags, authorities have praised the sector for staving off unemployment and driving growth.

But the sector is about to get a heavy dose of state regulation, with consequences for everyone from laid-off workers taking up virtual salesmanship to one of China’s biggest celebrities: Fan Bingbing.

According to a new nine-item list of regulations dated Nov. 12 but made public on Tuesday, China must beef up its surveillance of the live-streaming space in order to “create a healthy industry ecology” and “prevent and curb the breeding and spread of low, vulgar, kitschy or other such content bad for morale.”

The directive states that it’s critical for all platforms to “adhere to the right direction of prioritizing the socially beneficial, actively spread positive energy, depict truth, goodness and beauty, focus on generating a healthy spirit and promote clarity.”

The new regulations ask companies to develop new technical capacities to “boost good and punish bad content” — that is, to better detect and weed out content objectionable to the ruling Communist Party in real time.

In the past, controversial live-streams have led to vloggers’ detention or disappearance. In 2018, a 20-year-old with tens of millions of followers spent nearly a week in jail for briefly singing China’s national anthem in a humorous manner on the Huya live-stream platform. Meanwhile, Dong Yaoqiong, 29, was disappeared within hours after she live-streamed herself splashing ink on a poster of Chinese President Xi Jinping and expressing opposition to “his authoritarian dictatorship” that same year. She reappeared in January.

In recent months, a number of citizen journalists on the ground in Wuhan, the pandemic’s epicenter, were detained or disappeared following live-streams that criticized the government’s COVID-19 response or contradicted the controlled narratives from official outlets in the outbreak’s early months.

China’s regime is especially wary of social media activity capable of mobilizing large groups, particularly with unvetted messaging. It has capped chat groups on the ubiquitous Wechat app at 500 members. Millions of live-streams going out in real time pose a real technical challenge to censors. “It is necessary to establish a monitoring and censorship mechanism that integrates human and machine to track program dynamics, analyze public opinion and take timely measures to prevent deviations and problems,” the document stated.

Companies must “actively research and promote” new ways to propagate positive content and ensure it is “well-positioned and gets good traffic.” They should “actively explore the use of new technologies like big data and artificial intelligence… to let algorithms push the promotion of high-quality audiovisual content and issue early warnings against and quickly block illegal and bad content,” the document said.

Although the content regulations are not intended to address the financial or business sides of live-streaming, the sector is also suspected of concealing considerable fraudulent activity. In a 71-page report earlier this month U.S. investment firm Muddy Waters alleged “massive fraud” at YY Live, a streaming site that Baidu says it wants to buy from its parent JOYY Inc. The investor claims to have discovered that the company’s talent earns a small fraction of what it purports, that much traffic comes from bots, and that performers fake their popularity by roundtripping gifts to themselves. “We conclude that YY Live is ~90% fraudulent,” Muddy Waters assessed. JOYY Inc. denies the claim.

Part of this push towards “positivity” is a clause that deliberately cracks down on scandal-plagued celebs.

“It is necessary to take effective measures to not give unlawful and unethical artists a chance at public appearances or speaking opportunities,” the directive warned companies. Blocking out such stars would help “to prevent and curb the spread of low, vulgar bad habits such as flaunting wealth” that “pollute” the country’s internet space, it said.

China’s government-driven “cancel culture” can be extreme: tarnished stars find themselves immediately out of work and even digitally erased from past projects. Many, including Fan Bingbing, the A-lister who disappeared for months after a tax fraud scandal, and Li Xiaolu, the charming star of Joan Chen’s “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl” who fell from grace after a high-profile romantic affair, have turned to e-commerce as a way of making money and staying relevant while otherwise banned from Chinese show business.

Typically, the strategy has paid off. In April, one of Li’s early attempts at live-streamed e-commerce netted her more than $7 million in sales in just four hours, according to Chinese reports. Over the recent Nov. 11 “Singles’ Day” shopping event, a sort of Chinese Black Friday, Fan Bingbing sold more than $15 million in beauty products from her new line, a 150% year-on-year increase.

But “the latest announcement from the National Radio and TV Administration has undoubtedly killed her opportunity to sell goods” online going forward, making a comeback even harder, one Chinese commentary assessed.

Even the staid, state-run Xinhua news agency chimed in with an op-ed on the regulations Wednesday, essentially confirming as much.

“Online live-streams are a platform for public communication — they should not and cannot become a channel to show off wealth, money worshipping, and other kitschy, bad habits,” it read. “You must deal a heavy blow to deal with chaos — there must be ‘zero tolerance’ for immoral artists. Only by establishing clear rules and drawing a bottom line can…[we] return to a clean Internet space.”

The new regulations and political winds appear to have already spooked some in the biz: last week, a red carpet live-stream of a local film awards show was cut off just before Fan arrived, staining one of her first high-profile film-related appearances since her downfall two years ago.

On Wednesday, speculation was rife on Chinese social media around the other “immoral artists” who might be affected by the new rules.

Beyond banning bad influences, additional measures will be deployed to keep platforms and users in line.

Companies must now classify live-stream content according to category labels such as “music,” “dance, “fitness” and so on, the directive said. Every live-stream room must be marked with a category label and room number prominently on its live page. Hosts cannot change the category of their program without review and approval from the platform.

Any appearances of celebrities or foreigners must be reported in advance. Any livestreamed e-commerce events must report detailed information on program content and list those attending and hosting to China’s censorship authorities 14 working days beforehand.

Platforms must keep a file running for each live broadcast room and individual host, which will track a new system of points issued for quality or detracted for violations. Their score should be used to determine what content to promote. Rooms or hosts with repeated violations should be punished via tactics like setting limits to streaming durations or algorithmically burying content at the bottom of search rankings. Those who still don’t shape up will have their accounts deleted and be blacklisted by Chinese authorities, unable to live-stream again even on a different platform.

Such bans will be facilitated by stricter requirements for the real-name registration of both hosts and users, which will be confirmed by both company employees and facial recognition technology, the regulations said. Such a measure allows the government to better track what anyone is saying online at any time. It also helps to limit the actions of underage users, who have run into trouble for gifting hosts massive sums online.

To oversee all this and expand their ability to self-censor to remain in compliance, companies will have to invest in new personnel at their own expense.

At least one censor is now required for every 50 live broadcast rooms and platform runs. Companies are encouraged to employ even more than that so as to “dynamically adjust and enhance monitoring and censoring power in accordance [with] changes in online public opinion.” Training for censors will be increased, and those who have passed must be formally registered in a new government database.

Platforms must now report their numbers of live broadcast rooms, hosts and censors to their provincial authorities every quarter.

The document also states that “platforms must not adopt operating strategies that encourage users to irrationally issue ‘rewards’” — which up to now has been key to the sector’s business model.

Companies are now required to limit the maximum amount a user can gift over a daily and monthly time period. At the halfway mark, users should be sent a reminder of their consumption level that they must verify by text message or other means before they can begin spending again. Meanwhile, platforms must now delay issuing payouts of rewards to hosts as a bribe for good behavior, returning the gifted money back to users should the host commit any “illegal” actions.

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, China’s internet space has become increasingly regulated and controlled. Last month, the country’s top cyber authority announced it would also begin a campaign to rein in the “chaos” of information published online by Chinese mobile internet browsers, calling on companies to review their practices and clean up unregulated reports.

Source: Variety by Rebecca Davis