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How Disney got kicked out of China over Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a 1997 movie that ripped a hole in US-China relations
- About the early life of the Dalai Lama, Kundun caused tempers in China to boil over and was accused of being an interference in the country’s internal affairs
- Stuck between a rock and a hard place over its release, Disney took the coward’s way out – not that this did the movie giant much good
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Director Martin Scorsese is no stranger to controversy.
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Taxi Driver (1976) inspired a presidential assassination attempt; The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) saw him getting death threats of his own; and his recent thoughts on the Marvel Cinematic Universe weren’t much better received.
Yet it was Kundun (1997), a contemplative drama about the early life of the Dalai Lama – played by Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, a relative of the actual Dalai Lama – that caused the biggest furore, ripping a hole in US-China relations that took years to repair.
The 1990s saw China grudgingly opening its borders to the West. But just because the two cultures were trading with each other, it didn’t mean they understood each other, as three Hollywood films criticising China – Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, all released in 1997 – would show.
The first hint of trouble came in 1996, when Disney received a call from the Chinese embassy. It said the Chinese government was unhappy about Kundun (the Tibetan name for the Dalai Lama), which had started filming two days earlier in Morocco. The unspoken subtext? “Stop it.”
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