Zhang Yuan

Zhang Yuan (; born October 1963) is a Chinese film director who has been described by film scholars as a pioneering member of China's Sixth Generation of filmmakers. He and his films have won ten awards out of seventeen nominations received at international film festivals.

Feature films Born in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, Zhang received a BA in cinematography from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989. As a fledgling filmmaker, he chose to shoot in a documentary style and has referred to these early films (Mama, Sons, and Beijing Bastards) as "documentary feature-films."

Aside from some original short subjects he directed as a student filmmaker, the official debut of his career in 1990 is Mama, a semi-documentary account of a mother and her retarded son, which is considered to have a historical spot as one of the first features of the Sixth Generation movement and as China's "first independent film since 1949". His next film, 1993's Beijing Bastards follows Beijing's disaffected youth subculture and another title, Sons, in the same manner as Mama, blends the line between fiction and documentary film, as the actors, playing themselves, recreate the actual destruction of their family due to alcoholism and mental illness. However, the transgressive nature of these films (which depicted Chinese youth and society in harsh and unflattering imagery and terms), quickly came to the attention of the Chinese authorities. By April 1994, the Ministry of Film, Television and Culture issued a statement banning Zhang from filmmaking. Also banned were fellow Sixth-Generation directors He Jianjun, Wang Xiaoshuai, the documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang's wife, screenwriter Ning Dai, whose sister, director Ning Ying, is a transitional figure between the Fifth and Sixth Generation. In 1996, two years after the ban went into force, Zhang was ready to present his next, and most-controversial, work, the surreptitiously filmed East Palace, West Palace, also known as Behind the Forbidden City, China's first feature with homosexual characters and, furthermore, their persecution by the police. A print was secretly taken out of China and screened at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

After East Palace, West Palace, Zhang's style began to shift away from documentary-like neo-realist dramas to more conventionally filmed features. 1999's Seventeen Years, a family drama and also the first Chinese film with approval to shoot inside a Chinese prison, 2000's Miss Jin Xing, meanwhile, follows Zhang's interest in society's marginalized with a touching portrait of China's most famed transgender individual, Jin Xing, who in 1996 came out as a trans woman. Jin's story is told through a series of interviews with those who know her as well as with Jin herself.

Other media Besides films, Zhang has also directed numerous music videos and commercials. His most fruitful collaboration was with Chinese musician Cui Jian, resulting in several music videos, including the winner of the Best Asian Video, Wild in the Snow, at the 1991 MTV Music Video Awards.

Filmography