Palm Springs and Chinese government in film-festival standoff

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Organizers of the Palm Springs International Film Festival have rebuffed Chinese government pressure to pull a pro-Tibet documentary -- and instead will see two Chinese-backed features yanked from its program.

Festival organizers had scheduled “The Sun Behind the Clouds,” a documentary from Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam that follows the Dalai Lama during the 2008 protests in Tibet, the Beijing Olympics and talks with China. That rankled reps from the Chinese government, who met with festival director Darryl Macdonald and implored him not to show the doc. “They said that we should withdraw the documentary from the festival because it was riddled with lies and that the Chinese government and the Chinese people in China would be very unhappy with our presenting it,” Macdonald said.

Macdonald said he told a Chinese government rep, Vice Consul General Sun Weide, that while he understood the concerns, the festival puts a much higher value on freedom of expression. “Our mandate is to present as broad a spectrum of films and points of views as possible,” Macdonald said of the festival, which runs through Jan. 18.

The government then responded by pulling two Chinese films — the Nanking film “City of Life and Death,” which played Toronto to strong reviews and is scheduled to be released by National Geographic Films this year, and a movie titled “Quick, Quick, Slow” — that originally were scheduled to be shown in the 21st annual festival. “The Chinese position is that the filmmakers have withdrawn their films in protest of our showing the documentary about Tibet,” Macdonald said.

At least one of the filmmakers said he was conflicted about the turn of events. “My feelings are very complicated,” Lu Chuan, the director of “City of Life and Death’ (known as ‘Nanking, Nanking’ in China), told the Hollywood Reporter. “On the one hand I’m very grateful to the film festival for giving my film greater exposure; on the other hand, when it comes to Tibet and politics, we directors have no choice but to stand together with our film company.”

A phone message left for Weide was not immediately returned.

The festival said it will replace the screenings of “City of Life and Death” with “For a Moment, Freedom” a film about Middle Eastern refugees in Turkey, and the gangster comedy ‘Sticky Fingers.’

-- John Horn