A clutch of awards at the Cannes Film Festival in France has given global prominence to what insiders say is a bold era in Asian filmmaking, where China is emerging as a creative power.
Directors from China, Japan, Singapore and Cambodia took to the stage at the Palais des Festivals yesterday at the festival ended.
Praise was heaped on China’s Jia Zhangke (pictured with his wife) for his screenwriting of “A Touch of Sin” (Tian Zhu Ding), which he also directed – a tale of corruption, greed and exploitation in modern China that festival jury boss Steven Spielberg said was nothing less than “visionary.”
Jia, 43, was born in the poverty-stricken province of Shanxi, which has frequently provided a grim tableau for his lens.
After graduating from Beijing’s prestigious national Film Academy, he produced a series of gritty films portraying low-life characters including pickpockets, thugs and prostitutes, set in Shanxi and filled with long, meandering dialogue in local dialect.
“A Touch of Sin,’’ based on four true stories of poor people driven to acts of desperation, contains his most outspoken criticism yet of capitalist-communist China.
“Cinema makes me live,” Jia said in faltering English as he received the best screenwriting award. “China is now changing so fast. I think film is the best way to me to look for freedom.”
Spielberg and a fellow Oscar winner, Taiwanese-born American Ang Lee, pointed to exciting times in China, although Lee also warned of risk.

“China is coming on strong not just as a marketplace for international motion pictures, but coming on strong as a creative force,” Spielberg said.
Lee said “A Touch of Sin” was “an important movie” that the jury had unanimously liked. “The Chinese market and the people who love movies is growing up to be very sizeable, [and] perhaps [will] even one day surpass English-speaking territories,” said Lee. “So I really hope it grows, whether it is commercially or artistically or anything in between, [and] that everybody can grow healthily.
“A vicious cycle… is a big trap we need to look out for,” he warned, without elaborating.
Another laureate was Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda, 50, whose “Like Father Like Son’’ – a portrayal of two families who discover their boys were swapped at birth – won the third-ranked award, the Jury Prize.
The movie is based on a real-life story in which four children were abandoned by their mother and left to fend for themselves.
Singapore’s Anthony Chen won the Camera d’Or for a debut feature.
“Ilo Ilo,’’ set during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, explores the lives of Singapore’s workaholic, ambitious middle classes and the domestic help on which they depend.
It tells the tale of a Singaporean family and their Filipina maid, who befriends the family’s troubled son.
On Saturday, a documentary on the Khmer Rouge earned Cambodia’s Rithy Panh the top award in the “Un Certain Regard” category, which showcases emerging directors.
Entitled “L’Image Manquante” – “The Missing Picture’’ in English — the 95-minute work mixes archive footage of Khmer Rouge atrocities with hand-carved, painted figurines to represent Panh’s lost relatives.

Source: https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_news_detail.asp?id=36639