Berlin's blog

The 2010 edition of the Berlin International Film Festival, a film event second in importance only to Cannes, begins on Thursday evening with the International Premiere of a new Chinese film. APART TOGETHER by Tuan Yuan will kick off the festivities at the Berlinale Palast, the showcase cinema in Potsdamer Platz.

Chinese cinema has been in the ascendant as the country itself flexes its political and economic muscle. However not all the press has been positive. Last month, the Chinese government pulled two films from the program of the Palm Springs International Film Festival in protest of the Festival's decision to screen a documentary calling for sovereignty of Tibet. With the subject anathema to the Chinese officials, a threat to pull the films unless the Tibet documentary was itself pulled from the program was challenged by Palm Springs International Film Festival director Darryl MacDonald. A similar issue occured at New York's Film Forum theater, which also lost two Chinese films because of its scheduling of the Tibet documentary in its future roster.

However, all this bad blood will be set aside on Thursday evening as the Berlinale embraces this ambitious drama from one of China's most compelling film talents. TOGETHER APART looks at the equally divise relationship between the People's Republic of China on the Chinese mainland and the islannd republic of Taiwan (which China still consider a breakaway province). In the film, after 50 years since the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and the founding of the island republic of Taiwan, permission is given for the first time for a group of ex-soldiers of the National People’s Party or Kuomintang to travel from Taiwan to China and be reunited with family members in Shanghai.

These soldiers fought bitterly against Communist troops during China’s civil war from 1927 onwards, until they were forced to retreat to Taiwan in 1949. One of the comrades-in-arms travelling with the group to his former home in Shanghai is an aging soldier named Lui Yansheng. His reason for embarking on this journey is not to see the family members he left behind on the mainland but to find the one and only love of his life, Qiao Yu’e, whom he was obliged to leave behind in Shanghai without a word of farewell.

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