Chinese Government Opposition To The Film
The Gate of Heavenly Peace was completed in the fall of 1995, and premiered that October at the New York Film Festival. This time, controversy would be generated not by the exiled dissident community, but by the Chinese government. According to Newsweek (Oct. 9, 1995), the Chinese Consulate in New York was “not happy” to hear that The Gate of Heavenly Peace would be part of the festival. Consular officials said that “the film was an insult to China, and unless it was removed from the festival, they would be forced to withdraw Shanghai Triad.”
Other film festivals were also subjected to similar pressures; for example, in an official letter to the director of Filmfest DC, the Press Counsel of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington D.C. wrote, “As is well known, a very small number of people engaged themselves in anti-government violence in Beijing in June 1989 but failed. The film the Gate of Heavenly Peace sings praise of these people in total disregard of the facts. If this film is shown during the festival, it will mislead the audience and hurt the feelings of the 1.2 billion Chinese people. … Therefore, it is necessary and appropriate to withdraw this film from the festival.” The director of Filmfest DC did not comply.
Other festival directors were less resolute in the face of pressure to withdraw the film, as discussed in "Technical Problems...à la Chinoisie" in DOX Documentary Film Magazine.
Read more about this topic: The Gate Of Heavenly Peace
Famous quotes containing the words government, opposition and/or film:
“In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.”
—John Reed (1887–1920)
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)