China now has the biggest foreign box office--but they just pulled 'Django Unchained' from theatres

Last year, China became the biggest foreign market at the box office, surpassing Japan. With a huge, upwardly mobile population, it will likely remain at number one, and widen the gap between first and second place at the global box office. But China does not have a free press, and two stories in THR highlight the challenges of working in the Chinese marketplace.

Christian Johnston and Darren Mann, the directors of State of Control, a documentary that will be

shown at the HotDocs festival in Toronto, wrote a piece about how they were tailed during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 while trying to make their film about tensions between Tibetans and the Chinese government. They were followed, harassed, and eventually left the country after being constantly blocked from achieving their goals at every turn. In the meantime, the people they corresponded with had their computers hacked. IP addresses traced the viruses back to China. It's worth pointing out, as the filmmakers don't, that the Chinese government was on extreme high alert during the Beijing Olympics, and very cautious about the image they presented. I wonder if the reaction to their filming would be as intense now. Last year at the Tribeca Film Festival, the documentary High Tech, Low Life explored how citizen journalists have been taking on the government in small ways, exposing instances where the government has angered peasants with issues of imminent domain. Another wrote about  a case where the rape of a girl was covered up because the perpetrator was the son of a local official. The officials would have tea with the journalists, finding out what they were doing and marking out the invisible boundaries that they could not cross. There is leeway, but not for all. A political dissident like Ai Wei Wei (who has his own doc, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) is seen as more dangerous because he targets high-level political officials. You don't want to mess with those people.

As difficult as it can be to exercise free speech or bring injustices to light within China, it's also difficult to exhibit objectionable content. Director Quentin Tarantino's latest, Django Unchained, was pulled from theatres just as it released, because of "technical difficulties." By appearing to change its mind after approving the release, the Chinese government looks bad, and many citizens took to their version of Twitter, Weibo, to complain. My guess is that "technical difficulties" may be a euphemism for further cuts that need to be made, or mistakenly weren't made. Tarantino already noted that he de-saturated the color of blood in the movie in order to comply with Chinese standards. Perhaps the government decided it needs more of these types of cuts before they bring the film back. In the days and weeks to come, Hollywood as a whole will be watching closely to see if the release makes its way back into theatres. TheWeinstein Co. is known stateside for turning controversy into box-office dollars (like its campaign over the R rating of The Bully Project), so if Django Unchained returns to theatres, they just may be able to pique viewers' interests. Who wouldn't want to see a movie so controversial, it was temporarily pulled from theatres?