The Festival takes part in the Year of China as one of its very first events. This an opportunity to know more about a cinema which still has a few surprises in store for us, especially as regards the flourishing period prior to the Communist take-over in 1949. Until then China went through troubled times, with the Japanese invasion (in 1931) which fostered civil war.

In spite of such a context, pre-1949 Chinese cinema was very active. It started developing in Shanghai in the 1920s, especially at the end of the decade with the rise of sword films (wuxia pian). For the better part of the Thirties, while Chinese producers (including the Shaw Brothers) were building a film industry in Hong Kong, there was great creative activity in Shanghai. This was the time of the great stars (Hue-die and Ruan Lingyu) and of the first acclaimed auteurs (Sun Yu, for example, made half of his 20 films between 1928 and 1937). While silent films kept being made along talkies from 1931 to 1937, a number of "progressive" scriptwriters and directors, such as Sun Yu, Shen Xiling and Cai Cusheng, made notable realist and social melodramas. From 1938, the Shanghai film industry was confined to the foreign concessions while Hong Kong started experiencing its own film boom. But as soon as 1946, despite the civil war, left-wing film-makers successfully resumed making their realist films.

After the revolution

Of course, the Communist take-over was a watershed. The major film-makers of the early period soon had to stop working (the Festival will show Sun Yu's 1950 epic Life of Wu Xun, a film which was long forbidden because of Mao's own decision) or go and work in Hong Kong (like Zu Shilin). In the Fifties, the film industry was very active; among the propaganda films, a few directors managed to make more personal films such as Xie Jin and Cen Fan. From the mid-Sixties, the cultural revolution dealt a severe blow to film production. In the early Seventies, only eight films (the "eight model operas") could be seen on all Chinese screens (including the TV screen). Production slowly resumed at the end of the decade, with veterans Xie Jin and Cen Fan and his The True Story of Ah Q; it started booming again during the Eighties, when theatre admissions exceeded 20 billion and a new generation of directors was born: Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth in 1984), then Zhang Yuan and Ning Ying (For Fun in 1992).



Chinese cinema :
from the beginning to the 5th generation (1930 - 1990)
Two stars in the Milky Way / Yinhe Shuangxing - Shi Dongsan - 1931
Ye meigui - Sun Yu - 1932
Zhifen Shichang - Zhang Shichuan - 1933
The Divine - Shen nü - Wu Yonggang - 1934
Shizi jietou - Shen Xiling - 1937
Baqianli lu yun he yue - Shi Dongsan - 1947
Xiaocheng zhi chun - Fei Mu - 1948
Wu Xun Zhuan - Sun Yu - 1949
Nulan wu hao - Xie Jin - 1957
The Wild Wild Rose / Ye Meigui Zhi Lian - Wang Tianlin - 1960
Hongse niangzijun - Xie Jin - 1960
Hongse niangzijun - Cheng Yin - ballet - 1972
Ru Yi - de Huang Jianzhong - 1982
Meiyou hangbiao de heliu - Wu Tian Ming - 1983
Da yue bing - Chen Kaige - 1985
Ye Shan - Yan Xueshu - 1985
Hong goaliang - Zhang Yimou - 1987
Xuese qingchen - Li Shaohong - 1990