Skip to main content

New top story from Time: Here’s Why Chloé Zhao’s Oscars Win Was Censored in China

https://ift.tt/3voDBzG

Nomadland director Chloé Zhao made history at the 2021 Oscars Sunday evening, becoming the first woman of color to win Best Director in the institution’s 93-year history. She is only the second woman ever to pick up the accolade, after Kathryn Bigelow’s win for The Hurt Locker in 2010.

In her acceptance speech, Zhao spoke of her memories growing up in China and recited part of a poem called the Three Character Classic in Mandarin. The excerpt translates as “people at birth are inherently good.”

The Oscars win, which preceded Nomadland’s wins for Best Picture and Best Actress (for Frances McDormand), follows a similar scoop at the Golden Globes for Zhao, who was born in Beijing, and became the first Asian woman to collect that award too. On the same night, Yuh-Jung Youn became the first Korean actor to win an Academy Award for her role in Minari. Both of these firsts are milestones, especially given Hollywood’s long history of fetishizing, stereotyping or excluding Asian women in front of the camera—in more than nine decades, the Academy Awards has recognized fewer than two dozen Asian performers in acting categories, and when it has done so, has rewarded roles that trade on harmful tropes or stereotypes.

While Zhao’s success has been praised as a major step forward in representation behind the camera this awards season, efforts to celebrate these firsts appear to have been dampened in China, where reports of censorship and media silence emerged Monday.

Why China is censoring Chloé Zhao and Nomadland

Chinese state media had initially referred to Zhao as “the pride of China” after her Best Director win at the Golden Globes last month. But an unearthed 2013 interview with the American publication Filmmaker Magazine, in which Zhao talked about growing up as a teenager in China and referred to it as “a place where there are lies everywhere,” soon sparked backlash and reports of censorship on social media sites, as well as critiques of Zhao from social media users, reported the New York Times.

Since its initial publication, the 2013 article has been “edited and condensed,” according to a note on Filmmaker Magazine’s website, with the widely-quoted portion referring to Zhao’s upbringing in China now omitted.

China’s two biggest state-run media outlets, CCTV and Xinhua, did not carry reports of Zhao’s win as of Monday afternoon, although the state-run paper Global Times and its editor Hu Xijin did tweet their congratulations to the director. “Chloe Zhao wins Best Director,” a hashtag on the popular microblogging site Weibo, was censored and inaccessible for users, the Associated Press reported Monday. The AP also reported that searches for “Nomadland” and “Zhao Ting” (Zhao’s name in Chinese) were banned on film app Douban, while a news article about Zhao’s win on the hugely popular Chinese networking app WeChat was deleted. According to Reuters, organizers of a live-stream event in Shanghai were unable to watch the ceremony as planned Monday morning, as the organizer said access to his Virtual Private Network was blocked for nearly two hours.

What has Chloé Zhao said about China?

As a 14-year-old in the 1990s, Zhao moved to the U.K. to study at boarding school.

“A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background. I went to England suddenly and relearned my history,” said Zhao in the original version of the 2013 Filmmaker Magazine article, according to an archived version still available online. “Studying political science in a liberal arts college was a way for me to figure out what is real. Arm yourself with information, and then challenge that too.”

In conversation with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins for Variety, Zhao spoke of growing up in China with a love of manga, saying that “we didn’t have movies when I was growing up, not the same way that you guys had access to films, but I did have just cabinets and cabinets of Japanese manga. I just devoured them.”

Zhao later moved to the U.S. and studied political science before enrolling in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ graduate film program in 2010, where Spike Lee was her professor. Her first feature film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, was shot on a Native American reservation in South Dakota and released in 2015, and her follow-up The Rider, a contemporary Western drama, was released in 2017.

She has not forgotten her roots, however. In a recent profile in New York Magazine, Zhao spoke of her travels around the world and her Chinese heritage, describing northern Chinese people as “my own people” and of being “from China.” She has also spoken before about feeling like an outsider and how that interacts with her filmmaking, telling the Telegraph that “wherever I’ve gone in life, I’ve always felt like an outsider. So I’m naturally drawn towards other people who live on the periphery, or don’t live mainstream lifestyles.”

Zhao was praised on Twitter for speaking Mandarin in her acceptance speech. “If this win helps more people like me get to live their dreams, I’m so grateful,” Zhao told reporters backstage Sunday night, adding that her parents had always told her “who you are is enough, and who you are is your art.”

China’s history of Hollywood censorship

Sunday night’s awards ceremony wasn’t screened in China.

The Hong Kong station TVB, which has broadcast the Oscars every year since 1969, said it would not do so this year for commercial reasons. The decision fueled speculation that it was politically motivated and raised concerns around freedom of expression, exacerbated by the nomination of Do Not Split, a 35-minute film by Norweigan director Anders Hammery about the Hong Kong protests shortlisted for the Best Short Subject Documentary. The filmmakers of the winning documentary short Colette nodded to Hammer in their acceptance speech, saying that “the protesters in Hong Kong are not forgotten.”

China’s economic power and middle class have grown exponentially over the past two decades, and so has Beijing’s ability to dictate to foreign filmmakers eager to reach Chinese audiences. This year’s Oscars ceremony is not the first Hollywood cultural export that the Chinese government has censored or sought to control. As TIME reported in 2017, “pleasing Chinese audiences—and a Chinese central government hyperallergic to criticism—is now part of the Hollywood formula.”

A report last year by PEN America suggests that control has only increased, saying that filmmakers around the world are having to make difficult decisions about the “content, casting, plot, dialogue, and settings” of their movies to appease Chinese investors and gatekeepers. The report suggested that the 2016 Marvel film Dr. Strange whitewashed the Tibetan character The Ancient One (ultimately played by Tilda Swinton) “for fear of jeopardizing the film’s chances in China,” and that the Taiwanese flag was removed from the trailer for the Top Gun sequel, originally due in 2019 but postponed to 2021. The report also refers to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was pulled from China’s movie release schedule a week before release in 2019, reportedly due to the film’s unflattering depiction of Bruce Lee.

It’s unlikely that Nomadland, an independent film following modern-day nomads in America’s Midwest, would have found wide audiences in mainland China. But Zhao’s next feature, the Marvel blockbuster The Eternals, might pose more questions upon its release in November.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New Dashboards Give a Window into Muni Service Changes

New Dashboards Give a Window into Muni Service Changes By Kate McCarthy An inspector manages Muni service. New dashboards that help inform changes to Muni service are now live at SFMTA.com/MuniData Many factors inform our decisions about Muni service adjustments. These include making sure changes to service support the SFMTA’s values, which are economic vitality, environmental stewardship, trust and equity. We also evaluate travel patterns. You can now explore these patterns using the new Muni data dashboards  (SFMTA.com/MuniData). When looking at possible Muni service changes, the first thing we do is turn to the Muni Service Equity Strategy for guidance. Using the Muni Service Equity Strategy, we prioritize providing Muni service along routes that more often serve people of color, members of low-income households, and/or those who are dependent upon transit service, including people with disabilities and seniors. We also use ridership data to analyze where riders are boa...

Bihar: Stages collapse during Congress rallies in Darbhanga, West Champaran https://ift.tt/37QFnks

The stage on which Congress candidate from Jale assembly seat, Mashkoor Ahmad Usman was addressing a rally broke and collapsed in Bihar's Darbhanga on Thursday. In a similar incident, another stage collapsed and took down party leaders Imran Pratapgarhi and Akhilesh Singh along with several party workers who were on the dias, during a Congress rally at Bagahi Deoraj in Champaran.

India reports first 6 cases of new coronavirus strain after UK returnees test positive https://ift.tt/3pA0T2j

India on Tuesday reported the first six cases of the new coronavirus strain after six people who had returned from the United Kingdom were tested positive for the new UK variant genome. According to the details, the new coronavirus strain cases were reported from Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore. Samples of 3 UK returnees were tested and found positive for the new UK strain in NIMHANS, Bengaluru. The other two cases were tested at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; while the last case was tested at the National Institute of Virology, Pune.

Smarter Traffic Signals Prioritize Transit and People

Smarter Traffic Signals Prioritize Transit and People By Robert Lim Have you ever wondered how traffic signals could better balance the needs of all road users, whether driving, bicycling, walking or taking Muni? The SFMTA is rolling out its Connected Corridor Pilot this month to use transit platform and traffic signal sensor data to inform signal timing adjustments. The pilot also aims to collect information to support transit efficiency and street safety improvements.  Traffic engineers use signal timing adjustments as a tool to prioritize the flow of travel in specific directions or for different travel modes – Muni, people walking or driving – to meet the changing demands of the road network across different timepoints in a day. The Connected Corridors Pilot seeks to push the envelope of innovation by investing in advanced technologies, funded through a U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) grant. These tools will better position the city to serve the potential future ne...

FOX NEWS: Coronavirus: German Ikea parking lot used for Ramadan prayer An Ikea in Germany allowed some 800 Muslims to use its parking lot for a mass Eid prayer to commemorate the end of Ramadan on Sunday.

Coronavirus: German Ikea parking lot used for Ramadan prayer An Ikea in Germany allowed some 800 Muslims to use its parking lot for a mass Eid prayer to commemorate the end of Ramadan on Sunday. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/36xxQ7n

FOX NEWS: Ohio amusement park shut down after multiple fights break out Kings Island in Mason, around 20 miles north of Cincinnati, closed down 30 minutes early Saturday night after several fights among teenagers occurred, reports suggest.

Ohio amusement park shut down after multiple fights break out Kings Island in Mason, around 20 miles north of Cincinnati, closed down 30 minutes early Saturday night after several fights among teenagers occurred, reports suggest. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3wsn8uI

New top story from Time: At Thanksgiving, Biden Seeks Unity as Trump Stokes Fading Embers of a Campaign

https://ift.tt/3q4cU1i WILMINGTON, Del. — On a day of grace and grievance, President-elect Joe Biden summoned Americans to join in common purpose against the coronavirus pandemic and their political divisions while the man he will replace stoked the fading embers of his campaign to “turn the election over.” Biden, in a Thanksgiving-eve address to the nation, put the surging pandemic front and center, pledging to tap the “vast powers” of the federal government and to “change the course of the disease” once in office. But for that to work, he said, Americans must step up for their own safety and that of their fellow citizens. “I know the country has grown weary of the fight,” Biden said Wednesday. “We need to remember we’re at war with the virus, not with one another. Not with each other.” President Donald Trump, who has scarcely mentioned the pandemic in recent days even as it has achieved record heights, remained fixated on his election defeat. He sent his lawyer Rudy ...

FOX NEWS: Halloween-obsessed family shows off their elaborate costumes The St. Laurent family, from Indianapolis, has been dressing up in elaborate, handmade costumes for Halloween for the last six years.

Halloween-obsessed family shows off their elaborate costumes The St. Laurent family, from Indianapolis, has been dressing up in elaborate, handmade costumes for Halloween for the last six years. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3vvwPJq

FOX NEWS: Bride's father asks stepdad to help walk her down the aisle in sweet viral moment A selfless gesture by the father of a bride was shared on social media in a viral moment of him surprising the girl’s stepfather by asking him to help walk her to the altar.

Bride's father asks stepdad to help walk her down the aisle in sweet viral moment A selfless gesture by the father of a bride was shared on social media in a viral moment of him surprising the girl’s stepfather by asking him to help walk her to the altar. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3mMbkS5

New Muni Service Changes Start Saturday, August 19

New Muni Service Changes Start Saturday, August 19 By Clive Tsuma 28R 19th Avenue will run on weekdays between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. starting Monday, August 21.  Back to School  With SFUSD students returning to school August 16, many families who rely on Muni to get to school will see service increase after school as part of the new schedule. Because Muni vehicles often become crowded during morning peak hours and sometimes pass up stops when there is not enough room for more riders, families are encouraged to plan their trips ahead of time and hop on Muni early to make sure students get to school on time.  With every public school in the San Francisco Unified School District being served by at least one Muni route , students can expect extra Muni service on the first day of the school this fall and continue providing service throughout the school year. While the Muni service changes won’t be implemented until August 19, school tripper service will be offered starting Au...