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| Yan Bingyan takes the actress of the year.(Photo/Global Times) |
Informal gathering
This event doesn't require formal dress to walk the red carpet, and according to Huang, that this is just how they want it.
"As a guild, there should be a main objective, [the responsibility to] protect the rights of directors, [an occasion] to reward the achievements of a year, and [the duty to] sum up the existing problems," Huang explained.
He added that because it is an award of the directors' guild, the top award is the director of the year, rather than a movie work as in many other domestic and foreign awards.
Along with the rising number of domestically made movies and box-office earnings, more and more movie awards have been set up in the past few years. Besides the decades-long Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Awards, there are the Golden Goblet Awards of the Shanghai International Film Festival and the coming Beijing International Film Festival will hand out its Tiantan Award.
Long road ahead
While all of them want to be the most influential film award of the Chinese mainland, comparable to Hong Kong Film Awards in Hong Kong and Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, or even catch world attention like Cannes or Oscars, they share very limited influence now.
Shi Chuan, deputy director of the Shanghai Film Association, believes that it is because the awards in the mainland have "too much interference from the government."
"There are too many things behind a movie, making the selecting of awards impure," he said. "The only solution is to withdraw government organizations [from the process] and give the awards back to the people, to professional or audience organizations."
Though Shi thinks it is necessary to have awards like the China Film Directors Guild Award, which functions as a "mechanism for professional encouragement," and "to resist the pure market-oriented situation," he is conservative about how it can keep an independent status.
"The ceremony of last year was too luxurious, causing doubts about its objectivity," Shi commented. "Whether it can become an authority with its own brand is yet to be seen."
As a mainland screenwriter, Zhao Junjun believes in the professionalism of the award, yet he points out that professionalism and influence are two different things, especially among the common public.
"Seeing from this year's situation, the directors' guild wanted to spread this award [to the public], but it obviously has a long way to go," Zhao said. "How the professional opinions from the guild can guide the common audience, rather than being led, is a matter of concern."
As for Huang, he thinks the influence of their awards on a world stage is closely linked with the overall development of Chinese culture. "When China becomes the number one movie producing nation and with the most influential movie works, the world attention will be caught," he said.
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