The Chinese director of a movie set around the 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests risks a five-year work ban for showing it at the Cannes film festival without government approval, state media said Sunday.
Lou Ye, 40, violated the rules by sending "Summer Palace" directly to the prestigious festival, the Shenghuo Xinbao newspaper reported, citing the China Film Group Corp., the main company in charge of distributing films overseas.
"Apart from a fine, it's extremely likely that Lou Ye will face the punishment of not being able to shoot movies in China for a five-year period," an unnamed spokesman of the group told the paper.
The paper did not mention the main premise of "Summer Palace", which takes a look at the lives of Chinese students before the protests and how they deal with the bloody quelling of the demonstrations and its aftermath.
Officials said earlier that the film could not be approved due to the poor audio-visual quality of the copy submitted, and that they were awaiting a clean copy before making a decision.
In an interview with AFP in Cannes, Lou defended the film, insisting it is first and foremost a love story and not a political tract, and said he decided to show it without Beijing's approval because he felt it "belongs to everyone".
State censors insist on approving all domestic films to be screened at overseas film festivals.
The 1989 democracy protests — which saw hundreds of unarmed students and protesters killed in the streets of Beijing by the military — remain a taboo subject in state-controlled media, including on the Internet.
