A lens on beijing

American screenwriters take on the challenge of capturing the real China in an international competition

Is it romantic for an American boy and his Chinese girlfriend to meet in Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City? Foreigners say yes but the Chinese wrinkle their foreheads, whispering it's weird.

That was what screenwriter Crosby Selander and his Chinese film team faced often when they sat down to discuss his script in Beijing last month - collisions of ideas between two different cultures.

Selander is one of the participants of the just-finished 2013 Beijing International Screenwriting Competition. The 29-year-old is among seven winners in the short-film category who will be financed to make their scripts into movies in Beijing.

Starting in March, the screenwriting competition called for US-based writers to submit scripts of either short films or features themed on Beijing. There were 861 scripts offered in total, including many from writers at top universities like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and MIT.

In recent years, efforts to push Chinese culture onto the international stage have expanded greatly - in art, music and film. But this competition was a first and, judging by the number of participants and international exposure, a roaring success.

"We hope the young Americans know more about the culture of Beijing and China by taking part in the contest. It's also a good way to strengthen exchange and communications between the young generations of China and America," says Kevin Niu, chairman of the competition.

So how do the contestants feel?

"The experience in Beijing has opened my eyes to a culture and a country that I'd never truly known," says Selander, a freelance writer and director in Hollywood. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2010.

Like other winners, Selander stayed in Beijing for one week with his Chinese shooting team from the Beijing Film Academy. The seven-day trip and countless discussions with his Chinese partners gave him a deeper udnerstanding of Beijing. Selander has reworked his script to "make it more authentic to Beijing".

"The original story is like an adventure. The hero has explored all those famous tourist spots in Beijing. It looks more like a promotion film for the city," jokes Gao Cao, director of Selander's script You, Me and Beijing. Gao is now in the second year of a master's degree at Beijing Film Academy.

Selander's script follows a boy who leaves his American mother to live in Beijing with his Chinese father. Floundering in his new life in Beijing, the boy establishes a friendship with a Chinese girl through games and misadventures. Finally, he also eases the rigid attitudes of his father.

"It's weird for people living in Beijing to date at Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City. We won't do that," says Nian Jianlun, the producer of You, Me and Beijing, also a student from Beijing Film Academy.

Selander had never been to China before. Most of his impressions of Beijing were based on what he had read. So it is no wonder he wrote anecdotes like having the couple in his film eat Tanghulu - a traditional snack of candied fruit on skewers popular in winter - while the story takes place in summer.

Among the 15 winners at the competition award ceremony, Selander is one of the few who had come to Beijing for the first time; most others already had connections with China, including Cameron White from Princeton.

White has studied Chinese for eight years. His fluency makes it easy for him to communicate with his Chinese producer Huang Han, also a student from Beijing Film Academy.

"He knows China so well that I have no difficulty talking with him," says Huang.

White writes of a talented flautist who comes to Beijing to pursue her music dream. The girl, from a regional city, finally realises that a life spent in a practice room will not ensure her success.

Huang says she is reduced at first to a Chinese stereotype of a girl struggling through transition from a poor town to a big city. But White says it has nothing to do with where the heroine comes from and whether she's poor or not. It's a story about a girl opening her mind to a new life.

"It's very usual for Chinese to shoot the conflict between the poor and the rich. But the international audience can identify more with White's idea. That's what a story on Beijing should be," says 25-year-old Huang.

During the one-week stay in Beijing, the US script writers and Chinese video teams have compromised, exchanged ideas and been inspirations for each other.

Selander says his Chinese colleagues have made a good impression on him and remind him of the people he has worked with as a screenwrite in Hollywood.

"There are cultural differences - the food, the language - but these are surface distinctions.

"The Chinese I met all have the same concerns as Americans: job, school, family and traffic," says Selander.

dengzhangyu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 07/19/2013 page24)