HONG KONG — When Hollywood’s Relativity Media started filming a “hilarious comedy” in eastern China last week, it trumpeted its delight at “shooting in China, especially in a place as amazing as Linyi.”
Instead of hilarity, though, the film has produced mostly howls of outrage over the choice of location: a Chinese district notorious for its brutal mistreatment of a blind, self-taught lawyer who enraged Communist Party officials by demanding that they obey the law.
(AFP/Getty Images) - Blind activist Chen Guangcheng, right, is shown with hishis wife and son in 2005.
A mix of urban sprawl and villages, Linyi is the home — and prison — of Chen Guangcheng, a prominent legal activist jailed from 2006 to 2010 and now held incommunicado with his wife and young daughter. Chen’s school-age son lives with his sister-in-law.
A group of Chen’s supporters went to the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing on Tuesday with a petition pleading for the central government to intervene with officials in Linyi. The move followed an incident Sunday in which dozens of unidentified men allegedly attacked visitors to Linyi as they tried to get to Chen’s home — the latest in a long string of assaults, apparently orchestrated by Linyi’s party apparatus, on outsiders seeking to reach the activist.
Relativity Media “can shoot any place they want in China, but not in Linyi,” He Peirong, a Nanjing-based activist, said in a message posted on a Chinese version of Twitter. “They should stop making this film in Linyi at once.” If the company goes ahead, He added, the film should be boycotted: “Let us send one message to film fans with a conscience: Don’t support such a movie.”
Another Chinese micro-blogger said filming should continue, “but the name of the film should be changed to ‘Country of Doomsday, City of Hell.’ ” The movie, billed by Relativity Media as a “wild epic misadventure of debauchery and mayhem,” is called “21 and Over.”
Relativity Media, whose earlier ventures include “The Social Network” and “Bridesmaids,” declined to comment on its decision to film part of the comedy in Linyi and the dismay it has caused. A statement issued by the company Monday didn’t mention Linyi and said only that Relativity “has been a consistent and outspoken supporter of human rights and we would never knowingly do anything to undermine this commitment. We stand by that commitment and we are proud of our growing business relationships in China.”
In a news release last week, Relativity said the film is being made in association with Virgin Produced, part of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Virgin Produced didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said she agreed with the filmmakers that “Linyi is an ‘amazing place’ ” but said this is because of the “amazing abuses Linyi officials have heaped on one of China’s best-known legal rights activists and his family. . . . It’s almost equally amazing that Relativity was unaware of Linyi’s notoriety.”
Chen is so well known that Congress held a hearing on his case Tuesday in Washington. The hearing was organized by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which was set up in 2000 to monitor human rights and legal issues in China.
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