The Shanghai International Film Festival has announced two more entries to its official competition for the Golden Goblet prize this year: Chinese romantic drama The Stolen Years and Russian documentary Legend No. 17.
Directed by Hong Kong’s Barbara Wong Chun-chun, The Stolen Years stars China’s rom-com cherie du jour Bai Baihe (Love is Not Blind, A Wedding Invitation) as an advertising company executive who falls in love with her estranged boyfriend (Taiwan’s Joseph Chang) all over again after losing parts of her memory in a traffic accident.
The Stolen Years will be the third Chinese-language film placed in the running for the festival’s top award, alongside the earlier-announced entries of Unbeatable, an action-thriller by fellow Hong Kong director Dante Lam, and Sherwood Hu’s Amazing, a psychological drama about a tech whiz’s conflicts in developing what could be a mind-maiming computer game. The other ten previously announced international titles in competition include Yuri Bykov’s The Major, which made its world premiere at the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes; Lenin M. Shvam’s A Gun and A Ring; Kang Woo-suk’s Fists of Legend; Petar Popzlatev’s I Am You; Michel Poulette’s Maina; Sandra Nettelbeck’s Mr. Morgan’s Last Love; William Olsson’s Reliance; Savas Baykal’s Taste of Poetry; Taro Hyugaji’s Under the Nagasaki Sky; and Ilias Yannakakis' Joy.
Meanwhile, Russian director Nikolay Lebedev’s Legend No. 17 is a documentary charting the life of Valeri Kharlamov, the Russian ice hockey player who sprung to fame with astonishing performances against the then all-conquering Canadians in the 1972 Summit Series, and then eventually became one of the biggest stars in the sport before perishing in a car crash in 1981 at the age of 33. The film “offers rare insight into Russia's 'iron curtain' sporting regime at the time,” according to the festival’s press statement.
The King’s Speech’s director Tom Hooper will preside over the competition jury, which also include fellow directors Jiri Menzel (Closely Observed Trains), Ning Hao (Crazy Stone), Chris Kraus (Four Minutes) and Khosro Masoumi (Bear, the winner of the Golden Goblet last year), as well as Chinese actress Yu Nan and French critic Michel Ciment.
Concluding the nine-day festival, which is now in its 16th edition, the awards ceremony will take place at the Shanghai Culture Square Complex on June 23. The festival begins June 15.