"Red Cliff" to Open the 21st Tokyo International Film Festival news
Red Cliff, purported to be the biggest motion picture ever to be made in the history of Asian cinema helmed by internationally acclaimed Chinese film director and producer, John Woo, will open the 21st Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF).
The film is a coproduction of America, China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have given the film an international flavor, and features Tony Leung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Fengyi, Chang Chen, Zhao Wei, Hu Jun, Shidou Nakamura, and Chiling Lin.
The 21st Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) will be held from October 18th thru 26th of 2008 in Tokyo, Japan.
Introduction
The story of RED CLIFF takes place in 208 AD in China during the Han Dynasty. Despite the presence of an emperor, Han Xiandi, China was then divided into many warring states.
The ambitious Prime Minister Cao Cao, by using the Emperor as his puppet, waged war on a kingdom in the west, Xu, ruled by the emperor's uncle, Liu Bei. Cao Cao's ultimate goal was to wipe out all the kingdoms and install himself as emperor to a unified China. Liu Bei sent his military advisor Zhuge Liang as an envoy to the Wu Kingdom in the south, trying to persuade its ruler Sun Quan into joining forces.
There he met Wu's Viceroy Zhou Yu, and the two became friends amidst this uneasy alliance.
Enraged to learn that the two kingdoms have become allies, Cao Cao sent an army of eight hundred thousand soldiers and two thousand ships down south, hoping to kill two birds with one stone. Cao Cao's army set up camp at Crow Forest, across the Yangtze River from Red Cliff, where the allies were stationed.
Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang had to rely on their combined wisdom to turn the tide of battle. Numerous battles of wits and forces, on land and on water, eventually culminated into the most famous battle in Chinese history, where two thousand ships were burned, and the course of China's history was changed forever. That was the Battle of Red Cliff.
This famous battle was immortalized in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Although written some seven hundred years ago, the novel is still widely read all over Asia, and has spawned more than a dozen videogames and numerous comic books.
Director John Woo was attracted to this story for more than 20 years. But back then, neither the technology nor the market could support a film of this scale and magnitude. The opportunity came in the summer of 2004, when Woo's producer Terence Chang went to Beijing for the first time, and started putting the financing and production plan together.
