The cross-continental arts festival hosted by France and China lasting two years may have come to a close, but the two countries are continuing to forge a close cultural alliance.

 

China launches a cinematic invasion next month, when the movie powerhouse of the East stages a film festival in France. In May, Hong Kong film auteur Wong Kar Wai will head the jury of this year's Cannes Festival, one of the globe's most prestigious film competitions.

 

Back in China, when it comes to directors and actors, designers and architects, it seems that France is taking the country by storm.

 

As avant-garde architect Paul Andreu rushes to complete the futuristic National Grand Theatre in central Beijing, a contingent of leading French directors and cinema stars is descending on the Chinese capital as part of "Panorama du Cinema Francais."

 

French cinefest

 

The French film-fest is being screened in Shanghai, Chengdu and Beijing theatres until mid-February, and features some of the best cinema produced in France since the millennium.

 

Two of the French films being presented are anti-war epics. Joyeux Noel, or Merry Christmas, is set during the opening battles of World War I.

 

As December 25 approaches, soldiers on both sides refuse to take up arms against each other, and instead turn their trenches into makeshift Christmas camps.

 

La Maison de Nina, or Nina's House, is cinema sculpted from the closing days of World War II, when a diaspora of children from different backgrounds and religions, including some that survived concentration camps, finds sanctuary and a new will to live at Nina's House.

 

In Zaina, Cavaliere de l'Atlas, a young girl learns how to survive and strive for her freedom during an odyssey through Morocco's deserts with her father and other white-turbaned horsemen. Zaina director Bourlem Guerdjou has escorted his film to China.

 

The French film delegation in China also includes directors Claude Lelouch (The Courage to Love), Fabienne Berthaud (Frankie), Stphane Briz (Not Here To Be Loved), and Cdric Kahn (The Airplane).

 

Phillippe Geulluy, ambassador of France to China, says the coterie of French films and filmmakers will present a changing kaleidoscope of cinematic images and ideas to the Chinese public.

 

"France and China each has a rich tradition in the sphere of cinema," the ambassador said, adding that both the French and Chinese film industries have the phoenix-like capacity "for eternal renewal."

 

Actresses Florence Thomassin (The Birthday), Anne Consigny (Not Here To Be Loved) and Maiwann (who appeared in Luc Besson-directed global hits Leon and The Fifth Element) are also spearheading the massive promotion of French films throughout China, but the unquestioned superstar of the delegation is Jean Reno.

 

The Spanish-born Reno, who starred in the Besson films Le Grand Bleu, Nikita, and Leon, and later in Hollywood's Mission Impossible, has such a massive following in China that a routine call for reservations by email to attend Reno's first public talk in Beijing turned into a form of electronic roulette.

 

Cecile Barbier, a young official at the French Cultural Centre in Beijing, which hosted the Reno talk, said she was bombarded with email requests to meet the cross-cultural star.

 

The French Cultural Centre, which opened during the 100-week Year of China in France and Year of France in China of 2003-2005, features a cutting-edge cinema, but the 80-seat venue is proving too small for some of the hits being screened.

 

Architect's dream

 

Sometime in the near future, France's premier films may premiere at the fantastic National Grand Theatre being built on Chang'an Avenue.

 

The glass-and-titanium opera house, just west of the Great Hall of the People and south of the imperial Forbidden City, will be "a miniature metropolis of theatres," according to the building's creator, Frenchman Paul Andreu.

 

The theatre and its high-tech lighting will be reflected in a surrounding man-made pond, which in turn will be encircled by trees and a vast piazza along Chang'an Avenue. Andreu's Grand Theatre is shaped like a parabolic dome, or an egg in layman's terms, and the curved-space structure is helping put the city on the global avant-garde architecture map.

 

 

Andreu has designed a series of airports from Shanghai to Paris, and has a growing array of constructions in China that include the Oriental Arts Centre in Shanghai's Pudong district.

 

Andreu said the theatre's design "is pure form," explaining that visitors will enter the building through a transparent tunnel surrounded by rushing water. The surreal gateway prepares viewers for "the opera, (where) you see pure fantasy, pure creation you are entering a dream."

 

The soft-spoken Andreu, who is a poet and artist as well as an architect, has been a colossus of grace while under fire for introducing a new global architectural style in China.

 

"We are architects not warriors invading a country," he said. Andreu acknowledged: "Every new creation in architecture, in any art, if it is really new, will disturb the existing order of things."

 

"By choosing this project, the authorities are sending a strong message to young architects here that they are free to develop their own minds," he added.

 

Andreu was awarded France's Grand Prix National d'Architecture in 1976, and his new-millennium creations are becoming beacons of inspiration for the next generation of Chinese builders.

 

Hu Jie, an urban design expert at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said at Tsinghua's architecture school, "students are crazy about new designs like the Grand Theatre" by Paul Andreu.

 

(China Daily February 16, 2006)