Three years ago, China banned director Lou Ye from making any more movies for five years, after he showed Summer Palace — about the government’s crackdown on 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre — at the Cannes Film Festival. But the prohibition didn’t stop Ye from shooting new projects. Last year, covertly taping with digital cameras, he shot Spring Fever — a bisexual love affair complete with graphic gay sex scenes. Not only did Ye take it to Cannes in May (where it won Best Screenplay), but now he’s also taken it back to China.
Today in Hong Kong, Spring Fever opened the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival — in what the Associated Press reports “is likely the last of a handful of screenings on his home soil.” The film — about a private investigator, hired to spy on a married man having a gay affair, falls in love with the man’s boyfriend while maintaining a relationship with his girlfriend — has been picked up by distributors in Russia, South Korea, the U.S., and France. But not in China; that would be illegal.
This, despite Chinese authorities letting Ye travel freely, and not acting to stop him from screening Spring Fever at the Hong Kong film festival. The ban, however, will keep the movie from being shown to wider audiences on the mainland, the latest in a series of seemingly contradictory moves from Chinese authorities — including state-controlled media celebrating Shanghai’s first-ever gay pride prade — about whether gays will be officially accepted.
But it does stick with China’s unofficial official policy on all things homo, dubbed The Three Nos: No approval, no disapproval, and no promotion. Which includes ticket sales.
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Aussieguy
YOU GO GIRL!
Charles Merrill
Officially the Chinese government is atheist which is a good thing for gays. Buddhism is allowed in China because one can be an atheist and still be a Buddhist. The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christian, and Islam)condemn gay men.
Rainfish
Oh, hell…officially atheist Communist regimes also condemned Homosexuality (especially in the old USSR and in Cuba) calling it an anti-revolutionary expression of Western Decadence.
Of course, Hitler and the Nazis likewise imprisoned and executed Gays (mostly gay men) because homosexuality did not promote Aryan “superiority” and it was considered a genetically transmittable mental deficiency. And these aforementioned goons also were no great supporters of Judeo/Christian theology; yet they too found a way to hate us.
Bottom line: Homophobes will ALWAYS find an excuse to bash us.
It has a lot to do with the sexual fears of heterosexual males trying evolve a masculine identify for themselves and being encouraged to violently react to anything that contradicts or threatens that gender/social dictum. The status quo is also advanced by older males who perpetuate heterosexual chauvinism over homosexuals through legislation and/or social stigmatization and isolation.
Bottom line: Homophobes will ALWAYS find an excuse to bash us — God or no god. Although, a bronze-age desert tribal war-god just makes it more palatable for some morons though. It lends a “respectable” veneer to hatred masking as morality.
*J_C*
oh whatever just pedal ur movie in the united states after you get a bit of demand it should be peddled on the streets of china like all our us good movies lol so let the corruptness help you
Panshal
To Charles Merill : the Dalai Lama, although not a follower of an abrahamic religion, condemns gay sex too :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_topics_and_Buddhism#Tibetan_Buddhism