Zhang Yuan
| Zhang Yuan | |
|---|---|
Zhang Yuan, Cines del Sur 2007
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| Background information | |
| Chinese name | 張元 (traditional) |
| Chinese name | 张元 (simplified) |
| Pinyin | Zhāng Yuán (Mandarin) |
| Born | October 1963 (age 53) Nanjing, Jiangsu |
| Occupation | Film director |
| Spouse(s) | Ning Dai |
Zhang Yuan (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Zhāng Yuán; born October 1963) is a Chinese film director who has been described by film scholars as a pioneering member of China's Sixth Generation of filmmakers. He and his films have won ten awards out of seventeen nominations received at international film festivals.
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.
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