Zhang Yuan - Feature Films

Feature Films

Born in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, Zhang received a BA in cinematography from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989. Having initially emerged onto the film scene shortly after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he is frequently referenced as an exemplar of the pioneers who are grouped into the loosely-defined Sixth Generation. Despite a diploma from the prestigious Film Academy, Zhang decided to eschew his assigned position within the People's Liberation Army-connected August First Film Studio, choosing instead to produce his films independently. As a fledgling filmmaker, he chose to shoot in a documentary style and has referred to these early films (Mama, Sons, and Beijing Bastards) as "documentary feature-films."

Aside from some original short subjects he directed as a student filmmaker, the official debut of his career in 1990 is Mama, a semi-documentary account of a mother and her retarded son, which is considered to have a historical spot as one of the first features of the Sixth Generation movement and as China's "first independent film since 1949". His next film, 1993's Beijing Bastards follows Beijing's disaffected youth subculture and another title, Sons, in the same manner as Mama, blends the line between fiction and documentary film, as the actors, playing themselves, recreate the actual destruction of their family due to alcoholism and mental illness. However, the transgressive nature of these films (which depicted Chinese youth and society in harsh and unflattering imagery and terms), quickly came to the attention of the Chinese authorities. By April 1994, the Ministry of Film, Television and Culture issued a statement banning Zhang from filmmaking. Also banned were fellow Sixth-Generation directors He Jianjun, Wang Xiaoshuai, the documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang's wife, screenwriter Ning Dai, whose sister, director Ning Ying, is a transitional figure between the Fifth and Sixth Generation. In 1996, two years after the ban went into force, Zhang was ready to present his next, and most-controversial, work, the surreptitiously-filmed East Palace, West Palace, also known as Behind the Forbidden City, China's first feature with homosexual characters and, furthermore, their persecution by the police. A print was secretly taken out of China and screened at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

After East Palace, West Palace, Zhang's style began to shift away from documentary-like neo-realist dramas to more conventionally filmed features. 1999's Seventeen Years, a family drama and also the first Chinese film with approval to shoot inside a Chinese prison, nevertheless proved a significant international success winning the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival. 2002–2003 continued to see Zhang approaching more commercially viable works as well as his most prolific period yet, directing three films in the course of a year. The cinematic version of the Communist opera Jiang Jie, the celebrity-helmed romantic mystery Green Tea, and the romantic drama I Love You were successful, if a far cry from his earlier "underground" works. In 2006, he directed Little Red Flowers, based on writer and Chinese cultural icon Wang Shuo's semi-autobiographical novel It Could Be Beautiful. The film garnered a CICAE award at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.