Blood Brothers (Tiantang kou), Alexi Tan’s first feature film, produced by John Woo and Terence Chang, is to be the closing film at the 64th Venice Film Festival, which runs from 29th August to 8th September 2007 at Venice Lido, and is directed for the fourth year by Marco Müller and organised by the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Davide Croff.
With the decision to open its 64th edition with Atonement, the second film by 35-year-old director Joe Wright, and to close it with Blood Brothers (Tiantang kou), the first work by Alexi Tan, the Venice Film Festival has confirmed the trend of recent years of discovering young, promising talent, who are able to offer unusual viewpoints and new trends in contemporary cinema with their films. In recent years, the following are just some who have had their debut in Venice with enormous success: Santiago Amigorena, Allen Coulter, Aleksey German Jr, Miyazaki Goro, Ethan Hawke, Gregory Jacobs, Francesco Munzi, Fausto Paravidino, Liev Schreiber, Nomura Tetsuya, Piotr Uklansky, Ivan Vyrypaev.
The film which is a Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong co-production, stars Daniel Wu, Chang Chen, Shu Qi, Liu Ye, Tony Yang, Sun Honglei and Lulu Li, and is an action-packed thriller with an epic range. Inspired by John Woo’s masterpiece, Bullet in the Head (Die xue jie tou, 1990), the film tells the story of the events of a group of friends and the loss of their innocence in 1930s Shanghai. Blood Brothers (Tiantang kou) will be presented out of competition for its international premiere on the evening of 8th September in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema, in the presence of the director and cast.
Blood Brothers (Tiantang kou), is produced by not only Terence Chang but also by John Woo, now back in Asia as producer, following his Hollywood successes (Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II and Paycheck). The film boasts a cast including some of the most important stars of Asian cinema: Liu Ye (Curse of the Golden Flower by Zhang Yimou; The Floating Landscape by Carol Lai Miu Suet, in competition at the 60th Venice Film Festival), Daniel Wu (Everlasting Regret in competition at the 63rd Venice Film Festival; The Banquet by Xiaogang Feng, out of competition in the 62nd Venice Film Festival), Chang Chen (Breath by Kim Ki-duk in competition in Cannes 2007; 2046 by Wong Kar Wai; the episode entitled The Hand by Wong Kar Wai in Eros, out of competition in the 61st Venice Film Festival; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee; Happy Together by Wong Kar Wai), Shu Qi (Three Times and Millennium Mambo by Hou Hsiao-hsien; The Eye 2; Transporter) and Tony Yang (Catch; Formula 17; Ming Ming).
