De Niro film festival to screen in Beijing

Hollywood legend Robert DeNiro, seen here in 2006, is the co-founder of the Tribeca film festival which is heading to China despite strict movie censorship in the communist nation.[AFP]

The Tribeca film festival, co-founded by Hollywood legend Robert DeNiro, is heading to China next month despite strict movie censorship in the communist nation.

The festival, which was set up in New York in 2002 as a response to the previous year's September 11 World Trade Center attacks, will appear in Beijing's artistic 798 quarter on July 10-11, Xinhua news agency said.

The festival hopes to promote independent US and Chinese films, organisers said.

"With films from China having played a major role in the Tribeca Film Festival's first six years -- and having won several of our major awards in the bargain -- we're happy to begin this new international collaboration," said Peter Scarlet, artistic director of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Tribeca has screened 18 feature-length and short films from Chinese filmmakers since 2002, four of which have scooped festival awards, Xinhua said.

The Beijing edition will open with an outdoor screening of Planet B-Boy, a documentary by Korean-American director Benson Lee about the resurgence of break-dancing.

"Never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted that we would be showing Planet B-boy to an audience of 7,000 people... at the World Trade Center area, let alone at another outdoor screening on the other side of the world in Beijing," said Lee, according to Xinhua.

Tribeca, named after the area of New York where it is based, was set up by De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal and philanthropist Craig Hatkoff to try to help breathe life back into the downtown area following the 2001 attacks.

In China, foreign and domestic movies often suffer at the hands of the government's censors.

Only a handful of international films make it to national distribution each year, and those that do are often cut.

China's film censors recently cut out large sections of the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" film, cutting in half actor Chow Yun-Fat's role because it allegedly humiliated the Chinese people.

The Oscar-winning "The Departed" faced a ban on the mainland this year.