Censorship by the Chinese government has stifled the making of genre movies, action films and romances in the country, top Chinese filmmakers charged in Shanghai this week – in comments, curiously, that were reported on an official state news site, china.org.cn.
The comments came at a forum affiliated with the Shanghai International Film Festival, which is aiming to become one of the world's top fests.
Director Jia Zhangke, who won the Best Director Asian Film Award and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his 2006 movie "Still Life," said the Chinese state's "cultural over-cleanliness that bans the erotic, violent and terrifying is cultural naivete."
Chinese censors, he said, forced him to abandon a film that would have dealt with a man's sex life, as well as an espionage thriller that dealt with the Communist party.
"If I want to make the movie here, I have to portray all the communists as superheroes," Jia said. "This would betray my original idea and make it difficulty to develop the story."
Veteran director and producer Manfred Wong, at the same panel, agreed that the state restrictions made it extremely difficult to make action films (in which all the police must be portrayed as good) and romances (in which the characters cannot cohabit before marriage, or have affairs).
"The biggest problem is not that filmmakers are unwilling to create – they are given little to work with," he said.
The solution, he suggested, is to create a ratings board, so that stronger content could be made and rated appropriately.
"Sadly," the China.org.cn story concluded, "the film authority refuses to create one, and the country suffers without an important mechanism that would allow the film industry to grow more quickly."
The Chinese censorship board consists of about 30 members from diverse backgrounds.
