China may submit Wolf Totem, a co-production between China and France, as its 2016 Academy Awards best foreign language film entry after it was announced that another contender lost the bid late Tuesday.
The producers of Mountains May Depart, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Jia Zhangke, conceded in a statement on Weibo that regulator confirmed their film's bid to represent China at the Oscars was unsuccessful.
The announcement ended a fierce competition between the producers of Wolf Totem and Mountains May Depart.
The film bureau of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television has yet to announce its final decision before the Oct. 1 deadline for the Oscars foreign language film category. If it is chosen, Wolf Totem will become the second China-France co-production to be submitted after last year's The Nightingale.
In a previous statement summarizing the development of China's movie industry, the administration said Wolf Totem was able to achieve box office success, at 698 million yuan ($109 million), because it "used an international way to tell a Chinese story."
Based on a popular Chinese novel, Wolf Totem tells of a young man's obsession with wolf packs in the Inner Mongolia grasslands. It was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
The last Chinese submission to be named an official nominee by the Academy was Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou, in 2003.
Even for Jean Jacques Annaud, known for his animal films The Bear and Two Brothers, the making of Wolf Totem has been a real challenge.
The 71-year-old French director has spent the past four years in China, mostly in Beijing and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, where he trained 35 wolves with Canadian trainer Andrew Simpson and longtime producer Xavier Castano.
The wolves are important characters in Wolf Totem, a film based on the Chinese bestseller of the same name by Jiang Rong. It traces two young men's experiences on the Inner Mongolian grasslands, especially their interactions with the wolves there. Penguin published the book's English edition in 2008.
Many scenes in the film deal with wolves fighting with men and other animals. They could have been computergenerated, but Annaud insisted on using real wolves. Some also suggested using dogs and manipulating their tails with steel strings to look like those of the wolves', but the director refused.
"Only with real wolves is this film a picture that shows the genuine nature of the animal," he says.
To cast the wild animals challenged the crew's patience from the very beginning. The Mongolian wolves the novel depicts are rare, and the adult wolves could barely be trained. So they had to raise the wolves from cubs to adults, during which time some new cub wolves were born. Only wolves that grew up with the crew would feel accustomed to people being around and not try to escape when the camera rolled.
Just as directing with wolves was a challenge for Annuad, and acting with the animals was also hard for cast members.
From the first day he was on the set, Feng Shaofeng had known he was not the biggest star.
The 36-year-old actor, a heartthrob for young Chinese women, was led to a camp to meet 16 wolves, which had been training for two years.
Feng was excited to meet his co-stars, but Canadian wolf trainer Andrew Simpson asked him to calm down. He told Feng wolves do not like excited people, and if they do not like someone at the first sight, they will never like him.
"I was so nervous," Feng recalls. "The feeling was like I was requesting the approval of a superstar, who would ask the director to cast me aside immediately if he doesn't want to work with me."
These clever creatures posed a great challenge for 71-year-old director Annaud, too, although he is acclaimed for The Bear and Two Brothers, two brilliant films respectively on bears and tigers.
"Wolves are so special," Annaud says. "Wolves are masters of their own. You can never force them to do things they don't want to do."
Despite its $109 million box office success, the film has not won the hearts of all critics.
A prominent ethnically Mongolian Chinese writer has slammed the movie as being inaccurate and a "distortion of our Mongolian culture".
"The wolf has never been a totem of the Mongolian people," Guo Xuebo, an ethnic Mongolian novelist and a member of China Writer's Association, wrote on his microblog on Feb 18, the day before the movie, which is based on a book of the same name, was released.
"The 'wolf totem' in both the novel and the movie is a distortion of our Mongolian culture."
Guo's post has since been shared more than 9,000 times.
In the novel, wolves are praised by the Mongolians for their teamwork, competitive spirit and for maintaining the ecological equilibrium of the prairie. Through the words of the leader in the Mongolian tribe, the writer suggests that even the troops of Genghis Khan learned their war strategies from how wolf packs hunted.
However, Guo accuses the novel and the movie of misrepresenting the place of the wolf in Mongolian culture and exaggerating its role in the ecology of the grassland.
"Wolves are evil and are regarded as the enemy of Mongolian herdsmen," he asserts.
"I studied at the Mongolian Language Institute in the 1960s and focused on Mongolian history and cultural studies in the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Science in the 1980s. But I have never seen any written records suggesting that the wolf is a totem of the Mongolian people," Guo tells China Daily.
"The wolves are greedy, selfish, cold and cruel. To promote the spirit of the wolves is to go against humanity."
In another widely circulated review of the movie, Rasidurj, an ethnic Mongolian documentary director, shares Guo's view that the wolf has never been a totem of Mongolian people.
"The novel Wolf Totem should be categorized as a literary work which is filled with the writer's own ideals," Rasidurj wrote. "But I do praise Mr Jiang for raising public awareness of environmental protection of our grassland."
Although there is no direct historical evidence of the worship of wolves as a totem in Mongolian society, there is some evidence people revered wolves in folk customs.
