INAUGURAL COOLIDGE AWARD TO ZHANG YIMOU
The Coolidge Corner Theatre, an award-winning original Art Deco moviehouse and cultural landmark in Brookline, Massachusetts, will launch a newly established annual award honoring a selected film artist whose work advances the spirit of original and challenging filmmaking. The first Coolidge Award will be given to Zhang Yimou, the internationally acclaimed Chinese director.
Zhang is scheduled to arrive in Boston this coming May to accept the award and to participate in a ceremony and festivities at the Coolidge on May 26-27, 2004. The Coolidge Award presented to Zhang includes a specially commissioned inscribed memento and an unrestricted cash award of $10,000. Preceding the ceremony will be month-long programming at the theater of related classes and panel discussions, and a selected retrospective of Zhang’s work.
The focus of the award will rotate annually to highlight the many categories of films that the Coolidge has championed over the years in its mission to showcase high quality and diverse programming. Initial funding to support the Award was secured early on through a grant from the Patricia Larsen Foundation, which has bestowed $100,000 to be given in $10,000 increments yearly over the next 10 years.
Born in 1951 in Xi’an, The People’s Republic of China, Zhang Yimou was first brought to the attention of worldwide audiences in 1987 with the release of his first feature, Red Sorghum. The film, which starred rising actress Gong Li, won several international awards including the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Zhang went on to make two subsequent films, Ju Dou (1990) and Raise The Red Lantern (1991), also starring Gong Li and forming a trilogy which catapulted them both into the international spotlight.
The director made further headlines when Ju Dou and Raise The Red Lantern were banned from his homeland China, but enjoyed huge box office success in the U.S. and abroad. Zhang’s background as a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, also secured him as a pivotal member of the significant film movement in China known as the “Fifth Generation.”
Along with other graduates of the Academy, such as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, work from Fifth Generation filmmakers ventured into more realistic and human portraits of the Chinese way of life, its people and history.
With the releases of such films as The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), Shanghai Triad (1995), Not One Less (1999), and the most recent, Hero (2003), due for U.S. theatrical release this summer by Miramax Films, Zhang continues to challenge restricted notions of Chinese culture and creates a stunning revisionist cinematic aesthetic.
