Background
Zhang Yuan was born on October, 1963 in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.
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- Works
film
East Palace West Palace
(In China, homosexuality isn't illegal, but homosexuals ar...)
In China, homosexuality isn't illegal, but homosexuals are routinely persecuted by police and arrested for "hooliganism". The film focuses on a young gay writer called A-Lan who, being attracted to a young policeman named Xiao Shi, manages to have himself arrested and interrogated for a whole night. His life-story which he tells during the interrogation reflects the general repression of the Chinese society. Xiao Shi's attitude shifts from the initial revulsion to fascination and, finally, to attraction.
https://www.amazon.com/East-Palace-West-Si-Han/dp/B00019GI9C/?tag=2022091-20
1997
Little Red Flowers
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Red-Flowers-Zhang-Yuan/dp/B000OZ0MF4/?tag=2022091-20
2006
Zhang Yuan
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Education
Zhang Yuan received a Bachelor of Arts in cinematography from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989.
Career
As a fledgling filmmaker, Zhang Yuan chose to shoot in a documentary style. The official debut of his career in 1990 is Mama, a semi-documentary account of a mother and her retarded son. His next film, 1993's Beijing Bastards follows Beijing's disaffected youth subculture. The transgressive nature of these films quickly came to the attention of the Chinese authorities. By April 1994, the Ministry of Film, Television and Culture issued a statement banning Zhang Yuan from filmmaking.
In 1996, two years after the ban went into force, Zhang Yuan was ready to present his next, and most-controversial, work, the surreptitiously filmed East Palace, West Palace, also known as Behind the Forbidden City, China's first feature with homosexual characters and, furthermore, their persecution by the police. A print was secretly taken out of China and screened at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
After East Palace, West Palace, Zhang's style began to shift away from documentary-like neo-realist dramas to more conventionally filmed features. 1999's Seventeen Years, a family drama and also the first Chinese film with approval to shoot inside a Chinese prison, nevertheless proved a significant international success winning the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival. 2002–2003 continued to see Zhang Yuan approaching more commercially viable works as well as his most prolific period yet, directing three films in the course of a year. The cinematic version of the Communist opera Jiang Jie, the celebrity-helmed romantic mystery Green Tea, and the romantic drama I Love You were successful, if a far cry from his earlier "underground" works. In 2006, Zhang Yuan directed Little Red Flowers, based on writer and Chinese cultural icon Wang Shuo's semi-autobiographical novel It Could Be Beautiful. The film garnered a CICAE award at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.
Works
film
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East Palace West Palace
(In China, homosexuality isn't illegal, but homosexuals ar...)
1997 - Little Red Flowers 2006
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East Palace West Palace
