Variety Pans China's Oscar Pick as 'Tasteless' Propaganda — SkimNews
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- "Once Upon a Time in the Middle East" — directed by Wen Muyue as China's Oscar submission for Best International Feature — is unlikely to end the country's two-decade drought in that category, which dates back to Zhang Yimou's 2002 "Hero" per Variety.
- The film is a state-backed, two-and-a-half-hour blockbuster that was a summer box office hit at home, featuring large-scale destruction sequences including an entire city turned to rubble and a military base ambush.
- Wen Muyue uses the story of debt-ridden Chinese chef Xu Fu, played by Shen Teng, who takes over a restaurant in the fictional Gulf city of Bahata and gets caught up in bombings, U.S. occupation, and capture by the U.S. Army.
- The narrative depicts China symbolically emerging from the Iraq War as "a pacifistic patriarch and guardian of all the world's children," with the chef's survival ensured by the global demand for good Chinese cooking.
- The film caricatures both Americans and Iraqis and reserves particular venom for Chinese-American food — Xu Fu and restaurant owner Zaid vow never to serve dishes like General Tso's chicken, while a crass Chinese-American soldier bullies into free meals.
- The movie shifts abruptly between glossy cooking montages and brutal wartime violence, including a final act set in a terrorist stronghold with child suicide bombers — what Variety calls a "deranged whiplash effect" that is "shockingly tasteless" yet "extremely watchable."
Why it matters: China's two-decade Oscar drought in Best International Feature appears likely to continue, with Variety calling this year's state-backed submission 'shockingly tasteless' propaganda. The film packages Iraq War imagery into a blockbuster narrative of Chinese humanitarian guardianship, showing how Beijing fuses commercial entertainment success with geopolitical messaging aimed at global audiences.
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