Official Chinese Film Festivals and Film Awards: History, Configuration, and Legitimation

• In Event: “Chinese” Cinema and the Film Festival Circuit: Within and Beyond the People's Republic of China

Abstract

With the rise of interest and popularity in Chinese cinema, seminal studies of Chinese film festivals havebegun to appear. However, most, if not all, of the existing studies focus on independently organized film festivals, in which films made outside of the government-approved film industrial system are screened and evaluated. This paper shifts the focus by zeroing in not on the independent film festivals but on government-sponsored, “official” Chinese domestic film festivals, including the Shanghai International Film Festival, Changchun Film Festival, and Beijing International Film Festival, as well as government-approved Chinese domestic film awards such as the Golden Rooster Awards, Huabiao Awards, and Hundred Flowers Awards. This project is an exploratory study, and hence I will focus on answering three descriptive research questions as follows: 1) How and when did the festivals and awards come into existence? 2) What is the configuration (i.e., numbers and types) of the official film festivals and awards in China? 3) What are the organizational and institutional bases of the film festivals and awards (who sponsors, who organizes, who gives money, etc.), as well as different criteria of legitimation (e.g., Hundred Flowers Awards for popularity, Golden Rooster Awards for professional legitimation [film critics, filmmakers, film historians, etc.], and Huabiao Awards for political legitimation by the government)? Contra the widely shared image of official Chinese film festivals as cites of political correctness, I attempt to show the dynamism and multiplicity of logics—at times even contradictory—within the world of official Chinese film festivals and awards.

Author

• Seio Nakajima, Waseda University