Lu Chuan finds new film-makers a bold lot
By Shi Yingying (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-27 11:41
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Chinese filmmaker Lu Chuan is once again in the spotlight with his short film The Road to Our Beautiful Life, which is showing at the China Pavilion's multi-screen theater at the Shanghai expo.
He not only sketches four generations of Chinese in eight minutes, but also shares his definition of the so-called seventh-generation directors.
"All the sixth-generation directors are of the same age, share similar family backgrounds, have been nurtured by foreign film festivals, and deal with similar issues in their films," says Lu. "But the seventh generation, or the new generation of filmmakers, deal with a variety of themes and present a range of personal interpretations."
Lu, who is nearly 40, sees himself as closer to this group than to sixth-generation directors such as Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke. The box office earnings from his latest film City of Life and Death (also known as Nanjing!Nanjing!) touched 150 million yuan ($22 million) nationwide soon after it was released last summer, making him only the fourth director, after Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang, to achieve this success.
However, not every one is impressed.
"I feel like he's trying to express something in his film but fails to do so, in the end," says 25-year-old Liu Chang who works for a foreign film company in Shanghai.
Responding to these criticisms, Lu argues that he is trying to strike a "fine balance between independent presentation and market needs".
"I respect the courage of the six generation directors in trying to reveal the dark side of society in their films, but you can't force the post-80s and post-90s generation to discuss the same issue," the director says. "Different age groups have their own concerns and they all need to be addressed".