A sweeping Chinese epic set against the bloody upheaval of the early 20th century has emerged as a front runner at the Berlin film festival, which is dominated this year by revolutions and their consequences.
White Deer Plain (Bai lu yuan) by Wang Quan’an had its world premiere at the event and, despite its three-hour running time, drew enthusiastic applause at a media preview.
Mr Wang captured Berlin’s Golden Bear top prize in 2007 for Tuya’s Marriage, an unconventional love story about a herdswoman and her two husbands set against the rural exodus in contemporary China, and a screenwriting prize in 2010 for Apart Together.
The sexually-explicit new picture is based on what festival director Dieter Kosslick called “one of the most controversial novels in modern Chinese literature”, Chen Zhongshi’s 1992 book of the same name.
It tells the story of three generations of rival clans living in White Deer Plain in Shaanxi Province and a beautiful young woman (Mr Wang’s wife Zhang Yuqi) caught between them as the feudal system begins to give way to the Communist uprising.
The front runner is set against the bloody upheaval of the early 20th century
Peasants toiling in the wheat fields are taxed into even deeper poverty by the local government while officials harass them and rape their wives with impunity.
As news of the 1917 uprising against the tsar in Russia sweeps the country, the rural poor of White Deer Plain take up arms against their oppressors in a spasm of bloodletting.
But some are appalled by the violence and disoriented by the radical changes to the 1,000-year-old system crumbling around them.
One field worker tells another who is enchanted with this promise of Communism that “whatever system you have, the peasants will always suffer”.
Mr Wang told reporters that the two families symbolised the fate of the Chinese people as Japanese invaders, civil war and finally the Maoists determine the course of history.
He said looking back at those tumultuous decades was crucial to understanding the radical changes gripping the world’s most populous country today, and the sense of upheaval they are provoking there.