”Artists working under authoritarian governments often face a heart-wrenching choice between three not-so-appealing options: Cooperate with the censors, defy them, or flee to a country with a more permissive political climate. For Chinese filmmakers, the third may no longer be an option: The Communist Party’s censorship extends beyond the country’s borders.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that a segment from the anthology film Berlin, I Love You directed by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, while he was under house arrest in Beijing, was cut from the film’s final version released this month due to concerns about offending the Chinese government. The film, part of the Cities of Love series in which multiple directors are commissioned to create shorts set in a particular city, features Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, and Diego Luna in other segments. Ai’s short, which was directed remotely from China in 2015 and featured his 5-year-old son, who lived in Germany, was, he claims, not overtly political. (Ai has since relocated to Germany himself.) The next installment of Cities of Love is planned for Shanghai, which may have made investors particularly skittish.”
”With the Chinese government carefully guarding access to an audience of 1.4 billion people, studios are desperate to avoid anything that might “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” This has sometimes involved going to absurd lengths, such as digitally re-editing the 2012 Red Dawn remake to make the villains North Korean instead of Chinese and casting white actress Tilda Swinton to play a Tibetan sorcerer in Doctor Strange. Actor Richard Gere has, believably, suggested that his association with the Free Tibet movement is the reason his career in Hollywood has taken a downturn since the 1990s.”
