MCLC: Beijing Int. Screenwriting Competition

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Beijing Int. Screenwriting Competition
***********************************************************

Source: China Daily (7/17/13):
http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2013-07/17/content_16790117.htm

Beijing through the viewfinder

American screenwriters taken on the challenge of capturing the real China
in an international competition, Deng Zhangyu reports.

Is it romantic for an American boy and his brand-new Chinese girlfriend to
meet at the Tiananmen Square or at the Forbidden City? Foreigners say yes
but the Chinese wrinkle their foreheads, whispering it's weird.

That was what screenwriter Crosby Selander and his Chinese film team faced
often when they sat down to discuss the script in Beijing last month —
collisions of ideas between two different cultures.

Selander is one of the participants of the just-finished 2013 Beijing
International Screenwriting Competition
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2013-07/17/content_16790073.htm>. The
29-year-old is among seven winners in the short-film category who will be
financed to make their scripts into movies in Beijing.

Starting in March in the US, the screenwriting competition called for the
US-based writers to submit scripts of either short films or features
themed on Beijing. There were 861 scripts offered in total, including many
from writers at top universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and MIT.

In recent years, efforts to push Chinese culture onto the international
stage have expanded greatly — in arts, music and films. But this was the
first-of-its-kind competition held by Beijing and got good feedback,
according to the international public exposure and number of participants.

"We hope the young Americans know more about the culture of Beijing and
China by taking part in the contest. It's also a good way to strengthen
the exchange and communications between the young generations of China and
America," says Kevin Niu, chairman of the competition.


So how do the contestants feel?

"The experience in Beijing has opened my eyes to a culture and a country
that I'd never truly known," says Selander, a freelance writer and
director in Hollywood. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in
2010.
Like other winners, Selander stayed in Beijing for one week with his
Chinese shooting team from the Beijing Film Academy.  The seven-day trip
and countless discussions with his Chinese partners gave him a deeper
sense of Beijing. Selander has reworked his script to "make it more
authentic to Beijing".

"The original story is like an adventure. The hero has explored all those
famous tourist spots in Beijing. It looks more like a promotion film for
the city," jokes Gao Cao, director of Selander's script You, Me and
Beijing. Gao is now at his second year for his master degree at Beijing
Film Academy.

Selander's script follows a boy who left his American mother to live in
Beijing with his Chinese father.

Floundering in his new life in Beijing, the boy established a friendship
with a Chinese girl through games and misadventures. Finally, he also
eased the rigid attitudes of his father.

"It's weird for people living in Beijing to date at Tiananmen Square or
the Forbidden City. We won't do that," says Nian Jianlun, the producer of
You, Me and Beijing, also a student from Beijing Film Academy.

Selander had never been to China before. Most of his impressions of
Beijing were based on what he had read. So there's no wonder he could
write anecdotes like having the kids of his film eat Tanghulu — a
traditional snack of candied fruit on skewers popular in winter — while
the story happens in summer.

Among the 15 winners at the competition award ceremony, Selander is one of
the few who had come to Beijing for the first time; most others already
had connections with China, including Cameron White from Princeton.

White has studied Chinese for eight years. His fluency makes it easy to
communicate with his Chinese producer Huang Han, also a student from
Beijing Film Academy.

"He knows China so well that I have no difficulty talking with him," says
Huang.

White writes of a talented flutist who come to Beijing to pursue her music
dream. The girl from a regional city finally finds that a life spent in a
practice room will not ensure her success.

Huang says she is reduced to a Chinese stereotype of a girl struggling
from a life transition from a poor town to a big city at first. But White
says it has nothing to do with where the heroine comes from and whether
she's poor or not. It's a story about a girl opening her mind to a new
life.

"It's very usual for Chinese to shoot the conflict between the poor and
the rich. But the international audience can be more identified with
White's idea. That's what a story on Beijing should be," says the
25-year-old producer.

During the one-week stay in Beijing, the US script writers and Chinese
video teams have compromised, exchanged ideas and been inspirations by
each other.

Selander says the biggest impression was made by the people in Beijing.
Their hardworking and talent makes him think of people he worked with as a
screenwrite in Hollywood.

"There are cultural differences: the food, the language, but these are
surface distinctions.

"The Chinese I met all have the same concerns as Americans: job, school,
family and traffic," says Selander.