Word: kite
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This trials-of-Job saga has been told more powerfully in other brave Chinese films (Farewell My Concubine and The Blue Kite), and To Live lacks the surprise and sumptuousness of Zhang's The Story of Qiu Ju and Raise the Red Lantern. But the Chinese censors can still be shocked -- and vindictive. Zhang was recently forced, under the threat of never making another film in his homeland, to write an apology for wanting to promote To Live at Cannes. So one has to ask, How severe is the punishment for the crime of being an honest artist...
WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO good people: this is a dominant theme of literature and drama through the ages, from the Book of Job to Dostoyevsky novels to most soap operas and TV movies. It is also the story line of the Chinese film The Blue Kite -- and the story behind the suppression of this bold, masterly work...
Cataloged like this, the plot may sound like little more than anti-agitprop. And indeed The Blue Kite is by far the most excoriating depiction in Chinese film of Mao's ravages. But at its heart it is about domestic dreams, about a hope for better days that flies above the characters as brightly and vulnerably as Tietou's favorite blue kite. The rhythms of this family -- the meals and arguments, the worries about money and the sweet moments when a put- upon mom finds bliss playing with her bright child -- are handsomely observed and beautifully played. In Lu, Tian...
...Chinese authorities, The Blue Kite was nothing more than an incendiary insult. They approved the script but when Tian diverged from it, refused to let him edit his film; it languished for a year and was completed abroad by others working from the director's screenplay and notes. The film was banned in China, and last month Tian and six other prominent directors were forbidden to make films in their homeland...
...Tian must feel kinship with the beleaguered brood in The Blue Kite. It is now the challenge of the world film community to see that he is not silenced because he told the truth...