Director Hailed at Cannes Faces Five-year Film Ban in China

Chinese authorities have banned the film director Lou Ye from making films for five years because he failed to seek permission from them before his latest work, set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen uprising, was screened at the Cannes film festival.

Mr Lou's film Summer Palace is to be confiscated and income from it seized, the Xinhua news agency reported. The film impressed audiences when it was shown in the main competition for the Palme d'Or this May, but already troubles were rumbling with China's state administration of radio, film and television. The censors denied the film approval as Cannes opened, and members of the production team flew back to Beijing during the festival to negotiate with officials.

Later in the festival a number of Chinese journalists covering Cannes were summoned back early to Beijing.

The epic-scale film charts an intense love affair that begins at Beijing University in 1989, against the turbulent, exultant backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests - using chilling archive news footage of tanks rolling in to the square. But the euphoria of both the protests and the love affair quickly fades, and the story follows the characters as they split up and pursue their different paths.

The portrayal of the optimism and idealism of the protests sharply contradicts the official version of the events as counter-revolutionary riots. And, in a culture where showing sex in art is strictly off limits, the film contains at least eight explicit though tender sex scenes.

Mr Lou has had brushes with the authorities before; he suffered a two-year ban from film-making after his thriller-like, Shanghai-set Souzhou River (2000). At Cannes, he said that to "make sure that the film can be released in China ... I would agree to remove any scene they want." But such is the quantity of provocative material in the work that it seems unlikely that would be possible.

As for the Tiananmen Square scenes, he said: "The action does not just concern 1989, it covers 1989 to 2003. 1989 is just one year in that period ... during shooting, I always forget about this kind of issue, of what's banned and what's not. Now it's become a personal issue and I will have to find a way of improving my way of working."