Day: May 8, 2022

Any reference to Chinese-American author Geling Yan has been removed from a 2020 film released in China, despite it being an adaptation of part of one of her novels, her husband and agent Lawrence Walker told RFA.

The removal of her name comes after she made an outspoken social media post after a trafficked woman from rural China was found chained by the neck in an outhouse belonging to her “husband” after giving birth to eight children.

“Ever since I heard about this mother in chains, I’ve been angry, sad, restless, and in a trance all day…I realized that maybe it’s time to set aside time for anger, just to let it happen. Anger makes poets, and anger fuels many of my novels,” Yan wrote on the Survivors’ Poetry account on the social media platform WeChat.

“You ask: why are you angry? I answer: Because you are not.”

The saga began with Chinese director Zhang Yimou and Yan signing an agreement in 2011 giving Zhang the movie rights to her novel “The Criminal Lu Yanshi,” which tells the tale of a man sentenced to labor camp for the political crime of being a “rightist.”

Zhang then made a movie based on the book called “Coming Home.” However, he also completed a second movie based on the novel titled “One Second,” but deleted any reference to Yan or her work of fiction from the publicity materials.

“Geling signed a contract with Zhang Yimou in 2011 because he wanted to make a movie adaptation of her book. He did make a film called ‘Coming Home,’ which was based entirely on the last part of the novel,” Walker said.

“Then Zhang Yimou kept thinking about a second movie he could make from another storyline in the book about a prisoner who escapes from labor camp to watch a one-second-long appearance by his daughter in a movie,” he said.

“Zhang Yimou had always felt drawn to this story, so he used it as the basic framework for the movie ‘One Second’,” Walker said. “We never expected that he would adapt this novel into two movies, although the terms of the contract didn’t prevent it.”

“Geling gradually started collaborating with him on it [for that reason].”

Zhang invited Yan to Beijing for screenings of the unfinished film on two occasions, and there was a dispute about Yan’s credit on the movie, and Zhang had seemed keen to cooperate with Yan’s wishes, Walker said.

“But then there was a disagreement between them, because the movie rights to The Criminal Lu Yan had originally been transferred to two production companies, but he didn’t want to talk about getting them back from them; he wanted to go about it in an indirect way,” he said.

“At the time, they offered Geling four options, none of which mentioned ‘The Criminal Lu Yanshi’,” Walker said. “But they did thank Yan Geling; the wording was ‘inspired by Ms. Geling Yan, who has our greatest thanks’.”

In February 2019, the crew of ‘One Second’ traveled to Berlin for the Berlin International Film Festival. They met at Yan’s house, looking forward to seeing it presented in competition for a Golden Bear award, and entered the venue on the red carpet together with her.

But the movie was withdrawn abruptly just one hour before its scheduled media screening, allegedly for “technical reasons.”

Further delays ensued before the film was eventually released in November 2020 after Zhang made a number of edits and deletions to satisfy Chinese officials.

When the film finally did appear, there was no mention of Yan.

Walker said he has requested that Zhang and the production company restore Yan’s credit, as well as contacting the Hollywood Screenwriters’ Guild, of which Yan is a member, French film distribution company Wild Bunch of Paris, online platform Mubi, the Toronto Film Festival and the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain.

He asked them to consider whether they wanted to show films that didn’t respect the right of authors on their platforms. Mubi has since reinstated a reference to Yan as the author of the novel that inspired “One Second.”

But Walker said he had stopped short of taking legal action in China.

“We did also discuss whether to pursue a lawsuit in China, but the judiciary … are all of a piece with the government, so complaining about things in China meaningless,” Walker said. “We started thinking that maybe we could stop this sort of thing happening abroad instead.”

“They can do this in China, because they have all the power, but overseas, authors have copyright, intellectual property rights and moral rights,” he said.

Zhao Yijun of the Huanxi Media Group, which invested in “One Second,” told the couple that Yan’s name was definitely removed for political reasons, on orders from the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), and that Huanxi was obliged to implement that order.

Zhao also tried to threaten Yan if she tried to speak out about the move overseas.

“He said it was the SARFT that insisted on removing her name,” Walker said. “He said that Yan is up against an entire country, one individual, which immediately made [him] think about the Tiananmen Tank Man, meaning that the power of the state is many times greater than that of any individual.”

Walker said Yan’s outspoken criticism of official cover-ups in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan had also made her persona non grata in Beijing.

Yan also referred to CCP leader Xi Jinping as “also a human trafficker” in connection with the Jiangsu chained woman incident, not realizing that the conversation she was having was being streamed live online.

The CCP’s ban has likely brought heavy economic losses for Yan, too.

Sweden-based translator Wan Zhi said Zhang Yimou, once lauded as a member of the cutting-edge fifth generation of Chinese directors, has long since sold out to Beijing.

“Zhang Yimou is basically the pet director of the hollow men … he has no personality or rights of his own,” Wan said. “He’s like a puppet.”

“The Chinese authorities are becoming more and more shameless and more and more like criminals,” Wan said. “If it doesn’t want you talking about politics, then you can’t talk about politics.”

Repeated calls to Zhao Yijun’s cell phone were answered but the line immediately cut off this week.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Filipinos are voting for a new president Monday, with the son of an ousted dictator and a champion of reforms and human rights as top contenders in a tenuous moment in a deeply divided Asian democracy.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son and namesake of the strongman ousted in a 1986 army-backed “People Power” uprising, has led pre-election surveys with a seemingly insurmountable lead. But his closest challenger, Vice President Leni Robredo, has tapped into shock and outrage over the prospect of another Marcos recapturing the seat of power and harnessed an army of campaign volunteers to underpin her candidacy.

Eight other candidates, including former boxing star Manny Pacquiao, Manila Mayor Isko Moreno and former national police chief Sen. Panfilo Lacson have lagged far behind in voter-preference surveys.

Long lines of voters turned up early across most of the country without any major incident. But in southern Maguindanao province, a security hotspot, unidentified men fired at least three grenades Sunday night in the vicinity of the Datu Unsay town hall compound, wounding nine villagers who traveled there in advance from far-flung villages to be able to vote Monday. Two other grenades exploded shortly after in nearby Shariff Aguak town but caused no injuries, police said.

The winner will take office on June 30 for a single, six-year term as leader of a Southeast Asian nation hit hard by two years of COVID-19 outbreaks and lockdowns.

Still more challenging problems include a sagging economy, deeper poverty and unemployment, decades-long Muslim and communist insurgencies. There will likely also be questions over how to deal with calls demanding the prosecution of outgoing populist leader Rodrigo Duterte, whose anti-drug crackdown has left thousands of mostly petty suspects dead and sparked an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

Duterte’s daughter, southern Davao city Mayor Sara Duterte, has topped surveys as Marcos Jr.’s vice-presidential running mate in an alliance of the scions of two authoritarian leaders who concern human rights groups. The tie-up has combined the voting power of their separate northern and southern political strongholds, boosting their chances but compounding worries of human rights activists.

“History may repeat itself if they win,” said Myles Sanchez, a 42-year-old human rights worker. “There may be a repeat of martial law and the drug killings that happened under their parents.”

Sanchez said the violence and abuses that marked the martial-law era under Marcos and Duterte’s drug war more than three decades later victimized loved ones from two generations of her family. Her grandmother was sexually abused and her grandfathertortured by counterinsurgency troops under Marcos in the early 1980s in their impoverished farming village in Southern Leyte province.

Under Duterte’s crackdown, Sanchez’s brother, a sister and a sister-in-law were wrongfully linked to illegal drugs and separately killed, she told The Associated Press in an interview. She described the killings of her siblings as “a nightmare that has caused unspeakable pain.”

She begged Filipinos not to vote for politicians who either openly defended the widespread killings or conveniently looked away.

Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte have stayed away from such volatile issues in the three-month campaign and steadfastly stuck instead to a battle cry of national unity, even though the presidencies of their fathers had opened some of the most turbulent divisions in the country’s history.

“I have learned in our campaign not to retaliate,” Sara Duterte told followers Saturday night in the final day of campaigning, where she and Marcos Jr. thanked a huge crowd in a night of rap music, dance shows and fireworks near Manila Bay.

In a separate rally, Robredo thanked her supporters who jammed her star-studded sorties and waged a house-to-house battle to endorse her brand of clean and hands-on politics. She asked them to fight for patriotic ideals beyond the elections.

“We’ve learned that those who have awoken will never close their eyes again,” Robredo told a crowd that filled the main avenue in the capital’s Makati financial district. “It’s our right to have a future with dignity and it’s our responsibility to fight for it.”

Aside from the presidency, more than 18,000 government posts are contested, including half of the 24-member Senate, more than 300 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as provincial and local offices across the archipelago of more than 109 million Filipinos.

About 67 million have registered to cast their ballot during the 13-hour voting, an hour longer than the midterm elections in 2019 to compensate for the expected slower queues due to social distancing and other coronavirus safeguards.

Thousands of police and military personnel were deployed to secure election precincts, especially in rural regions with a history of violent political rivalries and where communist and Muslim rebels are active.

In 2009, gunmen deployed by the family of southern Maguindanao province’s then-governor massacred 58 people, including 32 journalists, in an attack on an election convoy that shocked the world.

 

 

Source: Voice of America