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Veteran mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou will be honored for the second time at Sunday’s Asian Film Awards ceremony. He will be presented with his lifetime achievement award and another award for director of the highest-grossing Asian film of 2023.
“These two awards not only recognize Chan’s extraordinary achievements, but also include winning the Asian Film Contribution Award at the 4th AFA in 2010 and the Best Director Award at the 15th Asian Film Awards in 2021. It is also a testament to his continued success with ‘One’ “Second,” said the AFA organizer.
“I consider myself very lucky to have chosen filmmaking as my lifelong profession. I have been in the industry for over 40 years and am grateful to everyone who has appreciated my films. [..] I will continue to learn and strive to surpass myself. I’m always looking forward to the future, and I hope that my next film will be my best,” Chan said in a prepared statement.
Set in the Southern Song Dynasty and with a tone somewhere between mystery and comedy, Full River Red tells the story of two soldiers tasked with uncovering the identity of the murderer of an emissary from a rival dynasty. It depicts how someone gets caught up in a conspiracy. It was released in January last year and topped China’s Lunar New Year box office, before being released in other regions including Hong Kong, the UK, North America, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. According to ticket agency Maoyan, the worldwide box office gross was $667 million, making it the top Asian film of last year and eighth worldwide.
Director Zhang recently received a lifetime honor at the Tokyo International Film Festival (which is a co-sponsor of AFA) and received the box office performance award at CineAsia in December.
Speaking in Tokyo, Chan said he plans to avoid acting, writing and producing in the latter half of his career and focus solely on directing, and plans to direct one film a year until he can no longer do so. In fact, two more of his Chan films have been released since Full River Red: the Shanghai-set Under the Light and the legal comedy-drama Article 20. The latter was released last month and topped mainland China’s box office charts in its third week. The total amount to date has reached $320 million.
Zhang, who started out as a cinematographer, made his directorial debut with “Red Sorghum,” a powerful story set in a sorghum distillery during the Sino-Japanese War, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
His films from 1988 to 1999 mainly focused on rural life, including “Ju Dou”, “Raise the Red Lantern”, “The Story of Qiu Ju”, “To Live”, “Not One Less,” and “The Road Home.” ”
As China’s film industry began to industrialize in 2000, director Zhang turned to the big-screen tentpole and made “Hero,” “The House of Flying Daggers” and “The Curse of the Golden Flower.”
Since then, his work has branched out further, including the intimate drama “Under the Hawthorn Tree,” the English action film “The Great Wall,” the Cultural Revolution drama “One Second,” and the spy thriller “Cliff Walkers.”
The Asian Film Awards will be held on Sunday at the Xiqu Center in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District.
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