Period films easier to get past censors

       Chinese film-makers are addressing modern social woes by setting their movies in the past to avoid censorship,Wheat director He Ping said at the Toronto film festival.
       For decades the Chinese have sought to get around censorship by using old poems or literature as allegories for modern situations.
       An international audience is now being acquainted with this tradition, carried on in film. He Ping's satirical film,screened here for the first time outside of his homeland, is set in the Warring States era from 476 BC to the unification of China by the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC.
       It depicts the struggles of women left behind when men go off to war and the way they remain happy - by believing in the lie that their loved ones will return to them once the conflict ends.
       The film could easily have been set in modern times, he said."But if you tell a critical story in a contemporary Chinese setting, it can be a much more sensitive issue. The reality for Chinese film-makers is that if you set a film that blasts current goings-on in a contemporary setting, it may not pass the censors," he said.
       Tian Zhuang Zhuang's film The Warrior and the Wolf , adapted from a short story by Japanese author Yasushi Inoue,is also set in the period of Warring States.
       And director Lu Chuan travelled back almost 80 years for his film City of Life and Death , about the infamous massacre in Nanjing during the 1937 fall of the then-capital to the Japanese army.
       He Ping is careful to point out that his film targets Chinese society and not China's Communist regime.
       "China has made a lot of progress of late, but there is still a lot of truth being covered up," he said."Chinese people are living a much happier life than at any point in their history, but they are still living a lie."
       He points out that a series of deadly coal mine accidents and a recent contaminated milk scandal only became known when "tragedy struck",adding that he fears much worse remains hidden.
       Lu Chuan's movie deals in gruesome detail with the killing of what China says were 300,000 defenseless civilians and prisoners of war by Japanese invaders. But it also portrays the Japanese soldiers as ordinary people caught up in the tragedy of war, rather than the bloodthirsty monsters that they are often
       depicted as in China.
       This is unforgivable in the eyes of some ultranationalists and Lu has already received at least one death threat.
       Lu says he was driven to "adopt the point of view of a Japanese soldier" to show the truth, and to counterbalance the "excessive" way the massacre has been dealt with in China in the past.