The 50th anniversary of the Venice Film Festival in 1982 saw a prestigious International Jury formed entirely of film directors, and the same formula has been adopted for the 75th anniversary of the Festival this year. Invited to chair it is the film-maker who, in the whole history of the Festival, has won most major awards, making a place for himself amongst the protagonists of cinema world-wide: the Chinese director, Zhang Yimou. The decision has been taken by the Board of Directors of the Biennale, chaired by its President, Davide Croff, which approved the proposal made by Marco Müller, director of the 64th Venice Film Festival, which will take place 29th August - 8th September.
Four times in competition at the Venice Film Festival – in 1991 with Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong deng long gao gao gua), in 1992 with The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju da guan si), in 1997 with Keep Cool (You hua hao hao shuo) and in 1999 with Not One Less (Yi ge dou bu neng shao), Zhang Yimou has won two Golden Lions, in 1992 and 1999, one Silver Lion in 1991, and one Coppa Volpi for best female star (Gong Li, in 1992 for The Story of Qiu Ju). Zhang is the only director in the world to have won all the most important awards in the Venice Film Festival in less than ten years.
Biographical Notes:
Zhang Yimou was born in the People's Republic of China in Xi'an (province of the Shaanxi) in 1950. The son of an officer in the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-Shek (for which reason the family was "purged" during the Cultural Revolution), the young Zhang Yimou was obliged to cut short his studies at the age of 18, as he was first sent to work in the countryside and then in a textile factory. Following the death of Mao, many higher education institutes that were closed by the Cultural Revolution were able to re-open their doors. Thus it was that in 1978 Zhang entered the recently re-opened Beijing Film Academy to study Photography (he graduated in 1982). He was then assigned to the Guangxi film studios, a location "out of the way" with regard to the heavy-handed censorship besetting the production centres of Beijing and Shanghai. In the Guangxi Film Studios two other graduates of the Academy, Zhang Junzhao and Chen Kaige (both from the Directing Course), were already working on the explosive first films of the new current.
Zhang Yimou's first work as director of photography was One and Eight (Yige he bage), directed in 1984 by Zhang Junzhao but blocked by the censors, who imposed no less than 75 cuts and modifications, and released in 1989 (the 'director's cut' of the film was presented at the 2005 Venice Film Festival as part of the retrospective dedicated to the hundred years of Mainland Chinese cinema). Zhang also worked as director of photography on Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), Chen Kaige's first feature film, a new bombshell that contributed to the smashing of Chinese official cinema. Zhang continued to work with Chen for his subsequent film, The Big Parade (Da yuebing, 1986), which has stayed invisible from immediately after its first release. In the same year (1986), he worked with director Wu Tianming as both director of photography and as leading actor in Old Well (Lao jing).
It was thanks to Wu Tianming, the director-producer who became director of the Xi'an studios in 1989 and gathered together all the new but "unapproved" talents, that Zhang was finally able to make his first film as director, Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1987), adapting a successful novel by Mo Yan. This won the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival and immediately thrust Zhang and his muse, actress Gong Li, in the forefront of the attention of the public and critics in China and abroad. Their artistic and sentimental relationship would last for five films.
