Mystery continues to shroud the recent 'suspension edict' issued by the China Film Group, a state-controlled conglomerate that exercises wide-ranging authority over the Chinese film industry, for cancelling screenings of director Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning bloody exploitation feature "Django Unchained", after months of marketing and tweaking of the film to please the Chinese censors.
Now comes word from The Washington Times, suggesting the underlying theme of "Django", highlighted by a tag-line on some of the movie posters, reading "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Vengeance", may have had a lot to do with the sudden cancellation.
According to The Washington Times the film, "...somehow tripped an alarm and triggered last minute jitters somewhere in the upper echelons of the state film bureaucracy... 'Django' might conceal within its manifest story of a violent slave revolt in the Old South a latent message for China’s subjugated masses, a revolutionary subtext that the cultural gatekeepers in the insulated ranks of China’s ruling Party elite had overlooked.
"Nested within the local and historical particulars, embedding 'Django' in America’s pre-Civil War South, is a rabble-rousing call to arms, a timeless and universal narrative of oppression, struggle and freedom. Mr. Tarantino tells the tale of a slave who, with the aid of a sympathetic foreigner, escapes bondage and turns the tables on his ruthless masters in a relentless campaign to regain his family, reclaim his liberty and punish the privileged elite of complacent oppressors who’d kept him in captivity..."
"Django Unchained" is Tarantino's first film to be released in China, where cultural authorities usually restrict the number of foreign films in theaters each year.
Chinese authorities claimed the feature had been postponed for "technical reasons".
Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Django Unchained"...
