‘Wolf Totem’ director in Oscar outrage
Print Edition
ACCLAIMED director Jean-Jacques Annaud denounced Academy Award organizers yesterday for ruling out his Sino-French co-production “Wolf Totem” for a foreign language Oscar as not being Chinese enough.
Annaud told reporters he was “stupefied” by the move and accused the Hollywood-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of a “banana republic level of arbitrariness.”
“Wolf Totem,” filmed mainly in Mandarin with some Mongolian, is based on a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a Chinese student’s time among nomads in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region during the “cultural revolution (1966-76)” and his attempts to raise a wolf in captivity.
It was filmed in China using Chinese actors, and was widely tipped as the country’s 2016 candidate for Best Foreign Language Film.
But Annaud cited a letter from the Academy as telling him: “When we looked at the creative make-up of Wolf Totem and realized that the director, two of the three writers, one of the producers, the DOP (director of photography), the editor and the composer were not Chinese, we determined that the film could not qualify as a Chinese entry.”
Annaud — who previously won a foreign language Oscar for the Ivory Coast with “Black and White In Color” in 1976 — told reporters: “I believe that the selection committee completely forgot the importance of actors in a film. It’s the same as ignoring the content of the film.”
The Academy picks nominees for the foreign-language Oscar from submissions from individual countries, which can only put forward one movie each year. China’s submission will now be romantic comedy “Go Away Mr Tumor.”
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