Zhang Yimou Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Veteran Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou will receive both the Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2023 Highest-Grossing Asian Film Award for his last feature Full River Red at this week’s Asian Film Awards. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Veteran Chinese director Zhang Yimou will be presented with a lifetime achievement award at the upcoming edition of the Festival of Far East Film in Italy’s Udine (April 24 – May 2). The lineup will include three films by Zhang: his 2023 political thriller “Under the Light” in its competition section; as well as “To Live” and “Raise the Red Lantern” in its restored classics section. The festival’s total lineup includes 74 films in total – 47 in competition and 28 out of competition) from 11 countries.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist was awarded the Best Film award at the Asian Film Awards this evening in Hong Kong. Scroll down for the full list of winners. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Veteran mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou is to be honored twice over at the Asian Film Awards ceremony on Sunday. He will be presented with a lifetime achievement award and a separate prize for directing the highest-grossing Asian film of 2023.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Full River Red,” the Zhang Yimou-directed period comedy-drama that released in January this year has earned its producer Huanxi Media Beijing the 2023 Asia Pacific Box Office Achievement Award at the CineAsia convention. The convention gets under way Monday in Bangkok and will run till Thursday (Dec. 4-7).

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Leading Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has a tough guy exterior – leather jackets, black shirts and a square jaw that has earned him acting awards alongside his top-level credentials as cinematographer and director of “Hero,” “The Road Home” – but on a visit to the Tokyo International Film Festival this week he was all smiles and frank talk. Zhang received a lifetime achievement award on Monday. On Tuesday the festival gave a gala screening to his historical blockbuster “Full River Red.” And at a Wednesday masterclass, Zhang was more gushed usable details about his process and frank advice for newcomers. “To be a film director you need to be physically in good shape. No smoking and no drinking,” he advised. “I generally adopt a two-stage process,” he explained.

“The pandemic has finally passed, and cinema has returned to normal, but the way people think has changed dramatically,” Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou concluded when quizzed by Deadline about cinema post-Covid 19 during a brief chat at the Tokyo Film Festival (TIFF). 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Hong Kong-based studio Edko Films will launch “Table for Six 2,” a sequel to its 2022 smash hit, at TIFFCOM, the rights market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival. The heartfelt comedy is again written and directed by Sunny Chan, who enjoyed breakout success with “Table for Six,” a comedy-drama that starts with an awkward family reunion dinner where past and present romantic relationships are tangled and almost anything that could go wrong did. For the sequel. Chan has reunited the original cast – Stephy Tang, Louis Cheung, Ivana Wong, Lin Min Chen, Peter Chan Charm Man – for three weddings and their aftermath.

Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has been set as the recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement award at the forthcoming Tokyo Film Festival (TIFF), running October 21 – November 1.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Leading Chinese film director Zhang Yimou is to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Tokyo International Film Festival later this month. The award will be presented to him during the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 23. Later, Zhang will take part in a special talk session at the TIFF Loungeco-hosted by the Japan Foundation. Additionally, his “Full River Red,” which was a box office sensation in China at the beginning of the year, will play as a gala selection during the Tokyo festival. Zhang, consider to be among China’s “fifth generation” of filmmakers, has had an extraordinary career that he has sustained for over three decades.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Zhang Yimou, China’s most enduring filmmaker, is joining the worldwide shift by feature film directors into the streaming arena. Zhang, who directed “Full River Red,” the most successful film of 2023 in China, is to be involved with his first TV series. He will executive produce “The First Shot,” his representatives confirmed to Variety. The show is to be directed by Xing Lu and is backed by Tencent Video. It is currently in development, with a tentative air date in 2025. That’s because Zhang has a film directing project with an anticipated Chinese New Year release date, due to begin shooting this summer.

Chinese author Yu Hua is no stranger to Cannes. The famed postmodernist writer’s work first graced the silver screens of the Palais back in 1994 with director Zhang Yimou’s masterclass adaptation of his seminal novel, “To Live.” A searing portrait of a single family’s struggle through China’s mid-century upheaval and the Cultural Revolution, “To Live” would go on to win the festival’s coveted Grand Prix award, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and the Best Actor Award.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Argentina-Chile coproduction “The Punishment,” directed by Matias Bize, was named best feature over the weekend at the close of the Beijing International Film Festival. Mexico’s Lila Avilés won the Tiantan Award for best director for her film “Totem.” Antonia Zegers and Line Renaud shared the best actress award for “The Punishment” and “Driving Madeleine,” respectively. The best actor award went to Xin Baiqing for Chinese movie “The Shadowless Tower.” The film, which premiered in February in Berlin, was the numerical winner. With the best screenplay, music, cinematography and artistic contribution awards, it won a total of five prizes.

Park Chan-wook’s stylish crime drama Decision to Leave leads the nominations for this year’s Asian Film Awards with a sweeping 10 nods, including Best Director and Best Film.

In addition to Manwaring’s professional experience, he is married to Chinese filmmaker Zhang Mo, the daughter and frequent collaborator of renowned Chinese film director Zhang Yimou (“The Great Wall,” “Hero,” House of Flying Daggers”). 

It’s early days at the XXIV Olympic Winter Games, but NBC must already be praying for some Gold medal glory or the Super Bowl to give them a boost. Right now, coming off record low viewership in the first night of primetime coverage, the billions the Comcast-owned network fork out to broadcast the Games until 2032 isn’t looking like money well spent.

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of this morning’s Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony live on NBC.

The opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics is just getting under way in Beijing. Overseeing the event is filmmaker Zhang Yimou, back after directing the 2008 Summer Games opener to global acclaim. This time around, Zhang has said the ceremony will have a romantic tone that he hopes will “amaze the whole world.”

After being forced to sit out the annually lucrative Chinese New Year period as the Covid crisis was just beginning in 2020, Chinese box office blasted to an all-time high during the comparable 2021 session. This week, the Year of the Tiger will be ushered in beginning February 1 with eight movies poised to potentially set new records. Projections are in the RMB 7B-8B+ range ($1.1B-$1.26B). Last year in the world’s biggest box office market, the week-long holiday reached RMB 7.8B ($1.2B at historical rates).

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefChina Media Group has launched CCTV-8K, an 8K ultra-high-definition TV channel, to broadcast the upcoming 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, state-owned news agency Xinhua reports.To deliver the channel, CMG had to accelerate development of its nascent 8K production, broadcasting and transmission operations, said the Asian Broadcasting Union.CMG has started to install giant 8K screens in public places across the country, starting with four railway stations in Beijing and Olympic venue Zhangjiakou.Other media novelties this year include Kuaishou, a short video and live-streaming platform, being set as an official broadcast partner. Kuaishou claims more than a billion downloads of its app and to be catching fierce rival Bytedance (which owns both TikTok and its Chinese equivalent Douyin.) Along with streaming platform Tencent Video, Kuaishou sub-licensed the China rights to last year’s Tokyo summer games and the 2022 Beijing Olympics from China Central Television.The games are set to go ahead in an ultra-strict anti-COVID bubble.

China’s status in the world, the image of the Chinese, and the rise of our national status, everything is totally different now.”Zhang, who is about 70 years old, directed three films nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards including “Ju Dou” in 1990, “Raise the Red Lantern” in 1991 and “Hero” in 2003.

At age 70, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou is showing no signs of slowing down.

Neon has taken North American rights to Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s One Second, which was just announced as the closing-night film for this year’s Toronto Film Festival.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterAhead of its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Neon has nabbed North American rights to Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s “One Second.”The film, written by Zhang and Zou Jingzhi, is adapted from a novel about a man who escapes a labour camp for a glimpse of his daughter. It’s scheduled as TIFF’s closing night film.“One Second” debuted last November in China, where it grossed $12 million at the box office.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter“Dear Evan Hansen,” a movie version of the hit Broadway show, will open the 2021 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival.In addition, the festival’s organizers announced that Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s latest feature “One Second” will close the festival. Described as a “love letter to cinema,” the film stars Wei Fan and Xiaochuan Li and follows a man who escapes a labour camp for a glimpse of his daughter.

With its spies, secrets, and super-secret code names, Zhang Yimou’s “Cliff Walkers” is seemingly the Chinese director’s version of James Bond. But that’s where the comparisons end.

Another classy Chinese action thriller whose dazzling style seems to take place in a deliberate narrative void, Cliff Walkers (previously titled Impasse) marks leading Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s first foray into the espionage genre.

Director Zhang Yimou returns to theaters this weekend with Cliff Walkers, an espionage thriller set in 1930s China. It’s a change of tone for the director of Shadow, House Of Flying Daggers and Hero, who also helmed Matt Damon-starrer The Great Wall in 2016.

Rebecca Davis editorChinese director Zhang Yimou’s stylish, snowy spy thriller “Impasse” is set to debut in China over the May 1 Labor Day weekend, joining what will be an unusually competitive line-up.“Impasse” was supposed to hit screens last year, but its release was pushed back to this upcoming April 30 due to the pandemic.

Universal's The Croods: A New Age was the decisive winner of a competitive three-way race at China's box office over the weekend, topping both holdover local hit Caught in Time and the latest release from venerated Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. Croods 2 opened in China to a healthy $19.2 million, which was $5 million more than its five-day holiday start in North America.

Rebecca Davis editorAfter a long tussle with China’s censorship authorities, director Zhang Yimou’s Cultural Revolution-set film “One Second” will finally hit local cinemas on Nov. 27, more than a-year-and-a-half after it was first set to debut.The title was originally to premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2019, but was abruptly yanked from the lineup just days before due to “technical reasons,” a common euphemism for state censorship in China.

Renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou's love letter to cinema, the period drama One Second, is finally headed to cinemas. Beijing regulators have approved the film for release on Nov.

Rebecca Davis editorChinese director Zhang Yimou’s Cultural Revolution-set film “One Second” has at long last passed government censorship, clearing it for a theatrical release in China, local reports and an image of the approval document circulating online show.

Zhang Yimou is one of the most acclaimed Chinese filmmakers working today.

By Tom Grater