Star-studded epic marks 60 years of communism in China
The Founding of a Republic, a star-studded epic which marks the 60th Anniversary of China’s Communist revolution, opens in UK cinemas on Thursday.
The film, which tells the story of the communist rise to power in 1949 from Chairman Mao’s days as a young soldier, was made by the state-run China Film Group, and stars over 100 of the country’s best-known actors, including Hong Kong king-fu heros Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as Crouching Tiger actress Zhang Ziyi.
The film’s producers hope that the cast list and subject matter will attract both older viewers and the internet-savvy younger generation, with the film tipped to be one of the highest-grossing films the country has seen for years.
The film traces the Communist Party’s rise to power from the end of the anti-Japanese War in 1945 through a series of bloody battles with Chiang Kai–shek’s nationalist forces, culminating in the founding of the People’s Republic on 1st October, 1949.
Whilst many of the film’s main roles will be filled by relative unknowns, including Mao look-alike Tang Guoqiang (who has played the communist leader in 27 other films), most of the better-known actors have given their services for free, visiting the set to film blink-and-you-miss-them cameo roles. Chan plays an unnamed newspaper reporter who delivers only a handful of lines, whilst Zhang appears as an unidentified apparatchik from the arts world.
Whilst many in the West associate Mao Zedong with the deaths of millions of Chinese during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, in China he is still very much admired and respected, his portrait adorning bank notes and gazing benevolently over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The film is directed by Huang Jianxin and China Film Group chairman Han Sanping. Jiangxin said that the film should not be branded “propaganda”, since modern Chinese audiences were unlikely to accept a simplistic rendering of history.
“It’s impossible to make a propaganda film to win your viewers today,” he told the state-run China Daily, although he admitted it was hoped the film’s many stars would woo audiences who may not otherwise pay to watch a film based on historical events.
