Tian Zhuangzhuang

He was the son of Tian Fang, a famous actor in the 1930s who became head of the Beijing Film Studio after 1949, and Yu Lan, an actress who later ran the Beijing Children's Film Studio.

Given his parents' busy jobs as studio chiefs, Tian was raised primarily by his grandmother, though his parents' positions also allowed him to live a relatively comfortable childhood.

But because of the Tians' prominence, Tian Zhuangzhuang suffered heavily during the Cultural Revolution, and both his parents were persecuted.

Unlike fellow director Chen Kaige, however, Tian never joined the Red Guards, and was eventually sent to the countryside in Jilin, like many youths from so-called "bad families."

Though from a cinema family, Tian did not initially want to follow in the family footsteps.

The film's quiet criticism of Communist policies in the 1950s and 1960s quickly made it a pariah in the Beijing Film Studio, who refused to submit the film for central approval to be sent abroad for post-production.

Tian Zhuangzhuang (born April 1952 in Beijing) is a Chinese film director, producer and actor.

Tian was born to an influential actor and actress in China.

Following a short stint in the military, Tian began his artistic career first as an amateur photographer and then as an assistant cinematographer at the Beijing Agricultural Film Studio.

Tian Zhuangzhuang was born on April 23, 1952, in Beijing.

Instead, Tian enlisted in the People's Liberation Army in 1968 and served for three years.

There he met a war photographer, who introduced him to the camera.

Working as a photographer for five years, Tian eventually decided to switch to cinematography and found a job as an assistant cinematographer at the Beijing Agricultural Film Studio.

In 1978, he was accepted to the Beijing Film Academy, from which he graduated in 1982, together with classmates Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.

In 1978, after three years at the studio, Tian applied for entrance in the Beijing Film Academy and was accepted.

However, he was forced to apply to the directing department rather than the cinematography department due to his age.

While enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, Tian directed a short student film, Our Corner (1980), based on a short story by Shi Tiesheng.

Technically, Our Corner stands as the first film made by Fifth Generation directors.

Years later, Our Corner would continue to be screened by professors at the BFA, introducing Tian to new generations of actors and filmmakers.

As a result of his role in the making of Our Corner, as well as his experience in film before entering school, Tian became a de facto leader among the students of the BFA.

They admired not only his natural talent, but also his natural eye for talent and loyalty to his friends, most notably with Hou Yong, who would go on to serve as his cinematographer in many of Tian's early works.

Tian reached international prominence with a pair of experimental films in the mid-1980s, On the Hunting Ground (1985) and The Horse Thief (1986), both about ethnic minorities in China.

The class of 1982 collectively would soon gain fame as the so-called Fifth Generation film movement, with Tian Zhuangzhuang as one of the movement's key figures.

Upon his graduation in 1982, Tian was assigned to the Beijing Film Studio, though his early career was spent making films for other studios.

These included works for television, as well as the children's film Red Elephant (1982, co-directed with Zhang Jianya and Xie Xiaojing).

For example, television producers refused to screen his short film Our Corner, and his first major film, September (1984), suffered censor interference with several major scenes left on the cutting room floor.

Tian's early career was marked both with avant-garde documentary infused films (On the Hunting Ground (1985), The Horse Thief (1986)) to more commercial fare (Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch (1991)).

Nevertheless, stung by the rebukes, Tian followed up The Horse Thief with a string of commercially viable films, including Street Players (1987) (his first with the Beijing Film Studio), Rock 'n' Roll Kids (1988), and the historical costume film Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch (1991).

Tian has since tried to distance himself from these films, often noting that they were part of a journeyman period of his career, where he would sign on to direct existing projects with funding and screenplays already in place.

Though On the Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief were warmly received abroad — American director Martin Scorsese named The Horse Thief as his favorite film of the 1990s (when The Horse Thief was finally released in the United States) — neither film succeeded domestically, and both were considered commercial flops.

On the Hunting Ground, for example, sold a meager four prints.

Moreover, both films were criticized by the state and by traditionalists as elitist, and as pandering to foreign audiences, a charge that Tian vigorously and defiantly accepted, arguing that films were for the sophisticated.

In 1991, Tian began work on a quiet epic about one of modern China's darkest moments.

This film, The Blue Kite (1993), would eventually result in Tian's nearly decade long exile from the film industry, an exile he returned from with Springtime in a Small Town (2001).

But Tian would not face serious consequences as a result of his work until his masterpiece, The Blue Kite (1993), a film about the adverse effects of Communist rule from the Hundred Flowers Movement, through the Great Leap Forward, and especially the Cultural Revolution.

The Blue Kite reportedly had to be smuggled out of the country by Tian's friends, where it would proceed to screen at foreign film festivals (including the 1993 Cannes Film Festival) without approval.

In 1998 Tian was honoured with a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund, an international culture and development organisation based in Amsterdam.

Many of Tian's earlier works had drawn criticism from the Chinese government.

Throughout the 2000s, Tian Zhuangzhuang returned to the fore of Chinese cinema, directing films like the biopic The Go Master (2006) and the historical action film The Warrior and the Wolf (2009).

Since his banning after the release of The Blue Kite, Tian has also emerged as a mentor for some of China's newest film talents, and he has helped produce several important films for these new generations of directors.