Beijing film festival jury shares standards
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 16, 2015
French director Luc Besson and the other six jurors for the 5th Beijing International Film Festival's Tiantan Awards made their first appearance in Beijing on Wednesday to share their thoughts on how to vote for the festival’s best films.
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Chinese actress Zhou Xun, one of jurors for the 5th Beijing International Film Festival's Tiantan Awards, speaks at a press conference in Beijing on April 15, 2015. [Photo/China.org.cn] |
The jury, chaired by Luc Besson, will vote on the 15 films for 10 awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. They will present the Tiantan Awards during the festival's closing ceremony.
In addition to Besson, the jury also includes world-renowned directors, screenwriters, actors and actresses: Russian filmmaker Fedor Bondarchuk; Hong Kong filmmaker Peter Chan; American screenwriter and filmmaker Robert Mark Kamen; South Korean director and screenwriter Kim Ki-duk; Brazilian film producer, director, and screenwriter Fernando Meirelles; and Chinese actress Zhou Xun.
Besson said voting for great movies is a pleasant thing to do. He personally loves to see if audiences feel the emotion conveyed by the movie and feel touched by it, which is an important standard by which to judge if a movie is truly excellent. Besson also mentioned that a movie's biggest attraction is to allow audiences to see different people's lives and make them long to go to different places. He said that international film festivals are like places without nationalities or boundaries, places that connect people and things only through each movie's unique charm.
Chinese actress Zhou Xun, the only female juror, said she agreed with Besson that the emotion conveyed by a movie is very important. She said she will personally determine if a competing movie is good by whether its story touches and moves her, no matter whether the story is told from a man’s or a woman's perspective. Zhou also noted that she will pay attention to the actors' performances, the overall story structure and a movie's cinematography and artistic design.
South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, whose movies have never been shown in China, told reporters that dialogue is very sparse in his movies, so he would like to judge the films based on their scenes rather than on their dialogue lines or box office results. For him, he said, movies are the keys to resolving the puzzles of life, and he will primarily pay attention to movies with philosophical depth.
Hong Kong director Peter Chan added that watching movies is a very subjective and personal thing, and that because the seven jurors all have their own very personal styles and thoughts, their combined votes should create balanced awards results. Chan said he would like to see movies that can stir up thoughts about the world and move audiences. "A good movie can influence people's thoughts and emotions at the same time," he said.
There are 15 films from all over the world on the nomination short list in the race to win the festival's Tiantan Awards. The nominees include two Chinese films, "Wolf Totem" by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud and "The Taking of Tiger Mountain" by Tsui Hark. The others are "Belaya Belaya Noch (A White, White Night)" by Ramil Salakhutdinov (Russia), "Bitva za Sevastopol (Battle for Sevastopol)" by Sergeiy Mokritskiy (Russia/Ukraine), "Deti (Children)" by Jaroslav Vojtek (Slovakia/Czech Republic), "El Silencio del Rio (The Silence of the River)" by Carlos Triviño Mamby (Colombia), "Experimenter" by Michael Almereyda (United States), "Attihannu Mattu Kanaja (Fig Fruit And The Wasps)" by M.S. Prakash Babu (India), "Gruber Geht" by Marie Kreutzer (Austria), "Impermanent" by Amir Azizi (Iran), "La Scelta" by Michele Placido (Italy), "Love & Peace" by Shion Sono (Japan), "El Comienzo del Tiempo (The Beginning of Time)" by Bernardo Arellano (Mexico), "The Falling" by Carol Morley (United Kingdom) and "Je-bo-ja (The Whistleblower)" by Soonrye Yim (South Korea) .
A total of 930 films from 90 countries and regions -- of which 122 are Chinese films -- signed up for the Tiantan Awards competition. Only 15 were shortlisted by the film selection committee after three rounds of voting.
The annual Beijing International Film Festival will be held in Beijing from April 16 to 23.
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