Ting Zhao at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in California, U.S., March 2018.
Chinese-American director Zhao Ting’s film “Nomadland” has won four awards at the BAFTA Awards, known as the British Oscars. However, Zhao Ting has been banned by the Chinese Communist Party for criticizing “China is full of lies”, and “Nomadland” has been nominated for the Oscars, and the Chinese Communist Party has ordered the official media to stop broadcasting the Oscars.
The British Film Institute has announced that “Land of the Unwanted” has won four awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography. The film’s star, Frances McDormand, won the best actress award.
No Place to Call”, also known as “The Wandering World”, tells the story of a woman who lives in a van in the American West after the Great Depression. For this film, Jo Ting became the second woman in the 53-year history of the BAFTAs to win the Best Director award.
Prior to that, “Land of the Unwanted” had won the Golden Lion, the highest honor at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the American Society of Film Critics’ Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and Posthumous Award, and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Actress.
Born in Beijing, China, Zhao Ting studied in London, England during her high school years and then lived in the United States, where she earned a BA in Political Science and a BA in Film from New York University. Her father is Zhao Yuji, the former General Manager of Beijing Capital Steel Company, and her stepmother is the famous Chinese actress Song Dandan.
Zhao Ting is also the first Asian-American female director to win a Golden Globe after Ang Lee. She was once hailed by the Chinese Communist Party’s official media as “the pride of China”.
But then, in an early interview with foreign media, Zhao Ting said, “I grew up in China, and it’s a country full of lies. The remarks were exposed on the Internet. Zhao Ting was then turned into a “traitorous female director” and an “insult to China” and was banned by the Chinese Communist Party authorities, and the film was suspected to have been withdrawn.
In response, Hu Ping, editor-in-chief emeritus of Beijing Spring magazine, criticized the near-Cultural Revolution-style criticism as a reflection of the overall regression of Chinese society.
Hu said, “How weak is the Chinese Communist Party now? How sensitive is it? The fact that even a sentence spoken so many years ago is being rehashed reflects the (fragile) extent of the Xi Jinping administration today.”
Recently, Zhao Ting was selected as one of the top five Oscar finalists with “Land of the Unsupported,” along with the short documentary film “No Cutting Seats,” which is an anti-sending to China. Due to political sensitivities, the Communist Party’s CCTV has announced that it will cancel live coverage of the Oscars on April 25, and Hong Kong’s Beijing-controlled TV station, TVB, has also indicated that it will not broadcast the Oscars, breaking a more than 50-year tradition for the station.
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