The Berlinale Film Festival has unveiled the jury members for its main International Competition, which will be presided over by Kristin Stewart.
12.01.2023 - 19:15 / deadline.com
Chinese director, screenwriter and producer He Ping, best known internationally for his hybrid ‘Chinese Westerns’, has died aged 65. Local press reported that he died of illness in Beijing on January 10.
He Ping was well known on the international film festival circuit and was one of the first Chinese filmmakers to work with a U.S. studio, directing Warriors Of Heaven And Earth with backing from the now defunct Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia (CPFPA) in 2003. Similar to two award-winning films he made in the 1990s, the film was shot in the Western deserts of China and combined elements of classic Westerns and Chinese wuxia (swordplay) movies.
Born in Shanxi province, He started his career in the 1980s, initially directing stage productions and documentaries, and later transferring to the state-owned Xian Film Studio, where acclaimed directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige had also started their careers. His early fiction films included We Are The World (1988) and Kawashima Yoshiko (1989), about the Manchurian-Japanese princess of the same name.
In the 1990s, He directed his first two Chinese Westerns, Swordsmen In Double Flag Town (1991) and Sun Valley (1995), along with historical drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker (1994), which won a jury special mention at San Sebastian International Film Festival. Swordsmen In Double Flag Town won the Grand Prize at Japan’s Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, while Sun Valley won an Alfred Bauer Award Honorable Mention at Berlin Film Festival.
Warriors Of Heaven And Earth, starring Jiang Wen and Zhao Wei, was China’s submission to the best foreign-language film category (as it was then known) of the 2004 Academy Awards. Sony’s CPFPA, headed at the
The Berlinale Film Festival has unveiled the jury members for its main International Competition, which will be presided over by Kristin Stewart.
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Rick Tuber, a TV and film editor who won an Emmy and an ACE Eddie Award for his work on NBC’s classic medical drama ER, died January 7 of a heart attack at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 69.
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