Although there are still six months to go for the next year's Oscars, contestants from all over the world have prepared to compete for the honor.

Chen Kaige's The Promise is the Chinese mainland's official submission in the foreign language film category for the Academy Awards, which has long been a top honor complex of the Chinese-language filmmakers.

Together with The Promise, Hong Kong director Peter Chan's Perhaps Love and Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud will represent Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively.

Chinese directors have felt the prize is not just a pipe dream since Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon won the Best Foreign Language Film award in 2001. However, no more Chinese-language films have won an Oscar since the 2001 win. Some directors also started focusing on kung-fu films, trying to emulate Ang Lee's success.

Apart from the The Promise, which is said to be an epic blockbuster, Perhaps Love and The Wayward Cloud are a romance and a musical. Now, the three are only applicants at the starting point. Which one will snatch the Oscar statuette? We will have to wait and see.

The Promise

Chen's Farewell My Concubine was in the running for an Oscar in 1993's Oscar. Critics thought the movie was a masterpiece and it won the Palme d'or in Cannes but Hollywood wasn't interested in the art-house movie that had appealed to the Europeans so much.

Another "fifth-generation" director Zhang Yimou has been to the Oscars many times with his two kung-fu movies Hero and House of Flying Daggers.

Will The Promise, also a kung-fu film, fulfill the Chinese promise to win the Oscars? Han Sanping, producer of the film, is very confident in the race and predicted it would take Best Film, Best Director and Best Photography. "I believe, we will win," said Han. Director Chen even puffed that "as long as the movie is nominated, it must win."

A marketing staff member of the film surnamed Huang said: "The production features a strong Oriental color, which tries to talk about love, not only kung fu." No one can be sure whether it will win the race. Perhaps, the Oscar's judges have tired of kung fu.

In order to meet the Oscar entry requirements, The Promise will be screened in Chengdu from September 29 to October 5 and later in the US cinemas from December 19.

The Wayward Cloud

Tsai's erotic movie, The Wayward Cloud, is so far the most radical production of the Taiwanese auteur. It is an incredible love story about an adult movie star, which expresses the decline of human communication, family, male-female and romantic relationships in an urban society.

The production is a musical with only one line between the leading roles. It features strong sexual content, which attracted considerable attention in many international film festivals, including Berlin International Film Festival, Asia-Pacific Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival.

Tsai took Good Bye, Dragon Inn to last year's Oscars. Asked whether he is confident in the next year's awards, the Taiwanese "new wave" director showed his modesty by saying that there would be a lot of strong competitors from all over the world then and he didn't want to think too much about it.

Since the film contains explicit pornography, it is banned in Malaysia but recorded NTD 21 million (US$630,000) in box office in Taiwan, which was a big encouragement for Tsai. "I feel honored that the controversial movie was finally decided to represent Taiwan to compete for the Oscar awards," said Tsai.

Perhaps Love

Hong Kong veteran director Peter Chan's Perhaps Love defeated two other movies before it was announced to represent Hong Kong for the Oscar. The two other films are Stanley Kwan's Everlasting Regret and Stanley Tong's blockbuster The Myth.

Hung Cho-sing, chairman of Hong Kong Film Producers' Guild, said: "We finally chose Perhaps Love because the film has some distinctive features that few Hong Kong movies can match. Another reason is that the films we submitted in the previous years were all kung-fu productions or art-house movies set in the 1930s. Perhaps Love, however, is a great story which takes place in a modern setting."

Choreographed by Hollywood choreographer Farah Khan, the movie has already been branded as China's Chicago and a copy of Bollywood. But Chan has his own opinion, by saying “Perhaps Love should actually not be categorized as a musical. I just wanted to push the love affairs to a more extreme point and I found singing and dancing was a good way to do that. So I would rather call it a variation of a love story and I hope the Oscar judges will be touched by the theme."

In order to make a full preparation in Oscar, Chan has refused invitations to five international film festivals this year. Perhaps for him, the Oscar race is the best choice.

(Shenzhen Daily September 30, 2005)