Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home Latest to Join Cannes Lineup’s “Rumored” List

Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home is the latest film “rumored” to be coming to Cannes, according to this site. Coming Home is based on “Yan Geling’s novel ‘The Criminal Lu Yanshi,’ which tells a story of an old man’s emotional return to his family after decades of separation,” the website reports.

Recently Yimou joined Ang Lee at an NYU’s sponsored talk on the future of Chinese cinema (which will likely dominate the world’s market in five to ten years). Both directors also talk about their upcoming projects. Reported by NY Times’ Arts Beat.

Predicting that within five years the world’s filmmakers and distributors will all be “leaning forward to the Chinese market,” Mr. Zhang cautioned that the Chinese industry needed to place less emphasis on profits and “popcorn movies” and noted a lack of current Chinese films that were “full of imagination,” as well as good novels and stories to use as sources.

“It’s easy to say we have good movies, but difficult to do it,” he said.

Mr. Lee worried that mainland Chinese film, after a long fallow period, was growing too quickly with too great a focus on box office blockbusters. “Give the Chinese market some time,” he said. If it were allowed to naturally grow, he added, China could set an example for an American film industry that itself is “not very healthy.”

The event was sponsored by the Tisch School of the Arts and LeTV, the online video site that owns Le Vision Pictures, a producer of Mr. Zhang’s latest film, “Coming Home,” set during the Cultural Revolution and starring Gong Li.

Asked by the moderator, the Tisch professor Christine Choy, about their next projects, both directors said as little as possible. But Mr. Zhang allowed that he was discussing a Hollywood project — “I think it’s a large project,” he said — which would be his first film in English, a language he doesn’t speak. There have been reports that he is in negotiations to direct an adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel.

Mr. Lee spoke about a movie related to “boxing and belief,” a project that was first reported last fall, but said he still needed to raise money and, in the wake of the visually spectacular “Life of Pi,” develop even newer camera technologies to tell the story the way he wanted.

When he was given the chance to pose a question to Mr. Lee, Mr. Zhang mentioned his colleague’s singular success working in both the Asian and American markets and asked, rather intently, “How do you make the world understand you?”