Summer Palace takes the Golden Durian at the Barcelona Asian Film Festival

On May 5^th a jury at the 9^th Barcelona Asian Film Festival unanimously awarded Lou Ye’s controversial Summer Palace the Golden Durian award. The jury was made up of actors Eduard la Fernandez and Vicenta Ndongo, theatre director and playwright Carol Lopez, Chinese director Zhang Lu (Against the Grain), and film critic and founder of Midnight Eye Jasper Sharp. Lou Ye first came to attention with his stunningly artful updating of Vertigo, Suzhou River, and went on to make possibly one of the most audacious ever marriages of art and mainstream cinema with Purple Butterfly, a gangster film set against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation that plays like a tone poem.

With Summer Palace, his fourth feature, Lou took on the still politically charged subject matter of Tiananmen square, from the highly personal angle of a coming of age drama that provides a vibrant portrait of student life at Peking University in the eighties. Courageous as the attempt was, Lou was promptly banned from filmmaking for 5 years, much like Tian Zhuangzhuang (Blue Kite) before him, and the film was withdrawn from competition at Cannes (with rumours of Wong Kar-wai, then president of the jury, having been threatened). Aside from its political aspect, the film also attempted to push the envelope in terms of its sexual content, which possibly grated with the censors even more than Tiananmen.

Although not nearly as successful artistically as his previous films, Summer Palace is an important statement that seems to have been unaccountably swept under the carpet by western critics as well as the Chinese institution. The award given at the BAFF, coming as it does towards the end of its yearlong festival career before its inevitable disappearance into the underworld of Chinese bootlegs, finally acknowledges the achievement of one of China’s most talented young directors. It would have been a shame, I think, had he suffered the ignominy of being blacklisted without some form of encouragement from the wider film community.

The jury also gave special mentions to the Chinese documentary The Exam by director Pu Jian and Japanese femme-centric drama Strawberry Shortcakes by Hitoshi Yazaki. The audience award went to yet another Chinese film, Getting Home by Zhang Yang (Spicy Love Soup), a darkly comic, offbeat road movie about a man travelling across China with his dead friend. Getting Home marginally beat Dirty Carnival by Yu Ha (Once Upon a Time in High School), a highly original Korean gangster movie, to the award. Mainland Chinese films clean up at yet another festival, an occurrence that is becoming impressively frequent.

The Barcelona Asian Film Festival is one of the most interesting of the many festivals specialising in that part of the word that have emerged in the last decade. Without relying on the Asian Extreme angle in the slightest, the festival programme instead reads like an Asian film cinephile’s wet dream with new masterpieces from all the masters: Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, check; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, check; Jia Zhang Ke’s Still Life, check; Hong Sang-su’s Woman on the Beach, check; Patrick Tam’s After this our Exile, check. These are films that aren’t normally found outside the A-list festivals, let alone all together in one place. The festival also gave a special focus on Chinese film from the last 20 years, showing many iconic works including The Black Cannon Incident (1986) and Red Sorghum (1988).