No country for art-house films

A scene from Crosscurrent, starring Xin Zhilei as the main female role.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Crosscurrent, the Chinese-language movie that won a Silver Bear at the recently concluded Berlin International Film Festival, will hit mainland screens late next month. But box-office success at home is far from guaranteed. Xu Fan reports.

It is a problem Chinese art-house filmmakers have faced for a long time.

Art-house films that do well at prestigious film festivals abroad don't seem to click with domestic audiences despite China being a booming film market.

And Crosscurrent－the Chinese-language movie that won a Silver Bear at the recently concluded Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale－may be the latest victim of this syndrome.

The romantic film set on the Yangtze River, which the producers say will open in mainland theaters in late April, won the Outstanding Artistic Contribution to Cinematography award at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival on Feb 20.

Speaking of the film, the 42-year-old art-house director-writer Yang Chao－who tasted success on the international film-festival circuit in 2004, winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes for his feature debut Passages－says: "Western viewers' reactions (to the film) are pretty interesting. Viewers abroad often scream: 'I love every scene of the movie. It's so beautiful. But I don't understand what it (the film) is talking about.'"

But Yang, who spoke to China Daily in his Beijing studio, says their reactions were not unexpected. "Europeans typically watch independent Chinese movies reflecting human struggles and the evolution of society, but those films don't pay much attention to aesthetic aspects.