The Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards announced recently that Chinese director Lu Chuan's epic war movie "City of Life and Death" received the Best Foreign Language Film award, Chinesefilms.cn reports.
Cao Yu, the film's photographer, came in second for the Best Cinematography award.
Lu told the media yesterday—the 74th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre in which Japanese invaders overran Nanjing in December 13, 1937 and murdered up to 300,000 Chinese—that previous Chinese war movies had failed in the international film market for two reasons. The first one was that directors had always stood in the shoes of the Chinese and could not make movies from the prospective of all mankind. The second reason was that such movies had always defamed invaders without objective thinking.
"I aimed to avoid these flaws during the making of the movie," Lu said.
Zhang Yimou's "The Flowers of War," also set against the same historical backdrop, will hit national screens on December 15. Lu said he supported Zhang's movie because it was "very respectable for any director who has the courage to tell the story of Nanking Massacre on silver screens."