Chinese mystery tops great night for Asian cinema
Print Edition
The 64th Berlin film festival wrapped up yesterday after a resounding triumph for Asian cinema at its gala awards ceremony, including the Golden Bear top prize for a Chinese noir mystery.
“Bai Ri Yan Huo” (Black Coal, Thin Ice) by Diao Yinan about a washed-up ex-cop investigating a series of grisly murders took the highest honor, as well as the Silver Bear best actor award for its star Liao Fan.
“It’s really hard to believe that this dream has come true,” Diao said as he accepted the trophy, fighting back tears.
It was the first Chinese film to win in Berlin since the unconventional love story “Tuya De Hunshi” (Tuya’s Marriage) by Wang Quan’an in 2007.
The Berlinale gave its best actress prize to Japan’s Haru Kuroki for her role as a discreet housemaid in wartime Tokyo in Yoji Yamada’s “The Little House” (Chiisai Ouchi).
Yamada, 82, called the film a necessary reminder of war’s horrors for contemporary Japan.
Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” — offering a nostalgic look back at pre-World War II Europe — claimed the runner-up Silver Bear grand jury prize.
German media reported disappointment that the hot favorite to win the Golden Bear, US filmmaker Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” made over 12 years with the same actors, only claimed best director.
But most called the prize for “Black Coal, Thin Ice” justified in the competition.
“‘Bai Ri Yan Huo’ is a brilliant genre variation which knows how to self-confidently update its Western prototypes and put them in new contexts,” Spiegel Online said.
Berlin’s daily Der Tagesspiegel called the choice “respectable.”
The film “is a bloody genre piece, a social portrait of the Chinese backwoods and a passionate drama all in one,” it said. “And it represents a Chinese cinema, growing in aesthetic strength, that is successfully charting a new path between small films made below the censors’ radar and the bombastic hero epics in a booming domestic market.”
The second of three Chinese films in competition, “Blind Massage” (Tui Na) featuring a cast made up in part of amateur blind actors, captured a Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution for cinematographer Zeng Jian.
“Black Coal, Thin Ice” is set in the late 1990s in the frosty reaches of northern China and its murder mystery plot is told through enigmatic flashbacks.
Liao said he put on 20 kilograms to play the alcoholic suspended police officer who falls for a beautiful murder suspect (Gwei Lun Mei).
Diao said his third feature bridged the gap between pure arthouse cinema and multiplex fare
“I finally did find the right way to combine a film which has a commercial aspect to it but which is nonetheless art, so that it’s possible to launch it in these terms,” he told reporters after the awards ceremony.
Diao said Chinese films were gaining ground in Western cinemas thanks in part to their exposure at major festivals.
“Every time we take our films abroad it seems that there is an ever greater enthusiasm for Chinese cinema,” he said.
The film has yet to be released in China but, according to a state media report, it has received a permit for screening with release possible in April or May.
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