Wolf Totem by French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annuad will be the opening film of the 20th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). The film, which follows a Chinese student sent to the interior regions of the country during the Cultural Revolution, will be in 3D. The film also marks the complete mending of relations between Annaud and the Chinese government. Back in 1997, when he made Seven years in Tibet , Annaud, actor Brad Pitt and the film were banned in the country. The government objected to the ‘negative portrayal’ of the Chinese army and the film’s positive view of the Tibetan cause and the Dalai Lama.
Seven years in Tibet continues to be banned there, but Annaud was welcomed back in 2012 as the head of the jury of the Shanghai International Film Festival. But the invitation from the Chinese State-backed production house to film Wolf Totem came as a surprise.
Wolf Totem is based on a 2004 book of the same name, which was written under a pseudonym considering the controversial and political nature of the subject. During the Cultural Revolution a Chinese student is sent to the Inner Mongolia region to train the shepherds, like many other youngsters during that time. He gets obsessed with the behaviour of wolves and tries to raise one, when the government issues an order for all the wolves in the region to be killed.
Having worked with real animals in his previous films including The Bear and Two Brothers , Annaud has once again gone for real wolves in this. Training them took four years. Filming in the interior regions under tough weather conditions was another challenge. Wild Totem is one of the last films for which James Horner (who composed the Titanic soundtrack) scored music, before his passing early this year.
Annaud made a splashing debut in 1976 with the film Black and White in Colour , based on his own experiences in military service in Cameroon. It is particularly notable for the fact that it was Ivory Coast’s official entry to the Oscars and went on to win the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. It was the first Oscar for the entire Sub-Saharan African region.
