Hello, my name is Justin the Cluey. I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about famed mainland Chinese director, Zhang Yimu.

And Will said that because I know I was going to screw up the pronunciation of his name because I look at it

and I want to say Zhang and I know that's not what it is. I mean, look, am I pronouncing it right?

Possibly not. Yeah. Yeah. Zhang Yimu. Yeah. I got to think like, Jean. Zhang Yimu is like without

a doubt the most famous mainland Chinese film director. Is that too much of an overstatement?

Absolutely.

No contest.

This is the director that his movies have been able to kind of get an art house attention

and more of his movies than any mainland Chinese director.

I mean, raise the Red Lantern and Hero alone are two of the most famous Chinese films. And also two films that I think embody what interested us in him as a subject. What interests many people in him. Because he seems to be a guy. If you know anything about him, it's that he emerged in the 1980s with a series of movies that were consistently banned in mainland China.

Every single one of them.

But one of the reasons that he does have international attention is they played

international film festivals.

Yes.

And I think there was some mystique there as well that like the people watching them,

they're great films, but they're also, they can't play in his home country.

And he kept making films. During this

period of both like China opening up to the world, but also China presenting this image of being

kind of like this scary foreign empire that suppresses its own artists, you know? But then also in 2002,

he makes a movie called Hero with Jet Li, which I'm sure many of you listening have seen, that is kind of the cinematic embodiment of the new China.

And it's also a reaction to crashing Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

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