“Remembering 1942” famine epic unveiled at Shanghai Film Fest

PanARMENIAN.Net - Blockbuster Chinese director Feng Xiaogang on Sunday, June 17 unveiled the trailer for his upcoming film Remembering 1942, the 210 million yuan ($33 million) true story-based disaster epic that took 18 years to bring to the screen, at the Shanghai International Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The Huayi Brothers film, slated for a late-2012 release, stars Feng regulars Xu Fan (Aftershock) and Zhang Hanyu (Assembly) and boasts the performances of two Academy Award-winning actors -- Tim Robbins and Adrien Brody, who play a Catholic priest and an American journalist, respectively. Revolving around the true events of a devastating famine that took more than 3 million lives in China’s Henan province at the tail end of Japan’s invasion of China during WWII, the film’s depiction of the scale of misery and suffering was revealed by a line uttered by Brody’s character in the trailer, “I saw a dog eating a man.”

Depicting the large-scale exodus of refugees fleeing from the draught-wrecked area, the film featured scenes of more than 2,000 people in its re-creations of the massiveness of “a river of people with no end in sight.”

Feng, who adapted with renowned and best-selling Chinese author Liu Zhengyun the latter’s 1993 novel, said, “Tim Robbins told me after he read the script that ‘this is a story of the darkest of human impulses and the brightest of hope.’ What I learned from this story is that we are a nation of refugees that had survived numerous disasters. From this story, we can learn what we were as a nation, so that we know how to go forward.”

Author Liu said Feng portrayed in the film the dark humor in the Chinese national character in reaction to disasters.

Huayi Brothers has been attached to the project since its inception in 1993, and saw the proposed budget ballooned from 30 million yuan to 210 million yuan, a seven-fold increase. But Huayi Brothers Media Corp. president James Wang said he and his company were “honored” to back in the project.