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Summary The last time a mainland Chinese film won the Golden Lion was 2006.
The Chinese cinema industry may be the second largest in the world, but its films have been absent from major competitions at the most prestigious international festivals in the past year.Critics say pressure on directors to create commercially successful and politically safe products means less scope for artistic ambition at a time when Chinas filmmakers are focusing on a booming domestic market.The Venice Film Festival concluded last week and while the 80-year-old event has traditionally showcased Chinese cinema, there was no representative this year into the final list of 18 selected for its major competition, the Golden Lion.It was a similar case at this years Cannes festival, with no Chinese films being selected for the Palm Dor.The shame is that the past 12 months have been an exceptional period for Chinese-language cinema, said Stephen Cremin, co-founder of the influential Film Business Asia website tracking trends in Chinese cinema.Filmmakers are broadening the range of local genre cinema, he said, referring to an increasing number of Chinese takes on traditional horror, fantasy and gangster film templates.Even if many of these experiments have disappointed at the box office, they should still be recognised in a festival context. There is no international festival outside China that has stepped up as a platform, he said.The last time a mainland Chinese film won the Golden Lion was 2006, when Jia Zhangkes Still Life picked up the award, while Chen Kaiges Farewell My Concubine in 1993 remains the only Chinese film to win the Palm DOr.Chen surprised many this week with his comments at the Toronto International Film Festival, in which he cited a big cultural gap preventing Western audiences relating to films made in the East and vice-versa.But critics say his comments put him at odds with a growing trend of international cooperation on financing, production and distribution of films.The situation in Venice this year prompted festival director Alberto Barbera to call an unprecedented press conference for mainland Chinese media.At it, he stressed that the event remained supportive of Chinese cinema, despite the scarcity of its films screening there, something he explained as merely a coincidence.
