Oliver Stone urges Chinese film-makers to address Mao era

The outspoken American film director Oliver Stone caused a stir among officials at the Beijing Film Festival yesterday when he called on Chinese filmmakers to deal with thorny historical issues such as the excesses of the Mao Zedong era and the Cultural Revolution he imposed on the country.

The JFK , Nixon and Wall Street director said Mao had been lionised in dozens of Chinese films, but never criticised.

“You’ve got to make a movie about Mao, about the Cultural Revolution,” Stone said at a panel at the Beijing International Film Festival. “You do that, you open up, you stir the waters and you allow true creativity to emerge in this country.”

Chairman Mao, the founder of modern China, is a revered figure. However, he is also blamed for Stalinesque purges, for causing famine with the disastrous agricultural experiment known as the Great Leap Forward, in which millions died, and in orchestrating the Cultural Revolution, an experiment in ideological extremism he kickstarted nearly 50 years ago and in which many of today's leadership suffered, including President Xi Jinping.

Stone said: “You have to protect the country against the separatist movements, against the Uighurs or the Tibetans. I can understand not doing that subject – but not your history, for Christ’s sake.”

Even though Mao was largely responsible for the excesses of those years, the official line is that his legacy is 30 per cent bad, 70 per cent good. The Communist Party he created is still in power since the 1949 revolution – and talking about Mao's legacy in public is just not done.

Bad periods
Stone said America, for all its faults, was still ready to depict its bad periods in films.

Movies about Mao's era tend to be propaganda films like Founding of a Great Republic , which showed his role in the establishment of China. However, critical depictions of Mao are not permitted.

When the moderator of the discussion tried to turn it on to more general areas, Stone accused her of missing his point.

“We are not talking about making tourist pictures, photo postcards about girls in villages, this is not interesting to us. We need to see the history, to talk about great figures like Mao and the Cultural Revolution . . .

“You talk about protecting the people from their history, we’re talking about the essential essence of this nation . . . This whole century, you’ve not dealt with it,” said Stone, to applause in the audience.