Censorship

* Iran's acclaimed Farhadi seen as top prize front-runner * Like "A Separation", "The Past" looks at family, divorce * Only Chinese entry is thinly veiled political critique By Alexandria Sage CANNES, May 17 (Reuters) - Oscar-winning Iranian...

China employs an army of censors. As many as 50,000 well-trained monitors police the Internet, and 12 government departments are empowered to search and seize information and shut down users and sites. They work fast: A recent study conducted by two...

Coming soon to a theater near you: China's Communist Party. From demanding changes in plot lines that denigrate the Chinese leadership, to dampening lurid depictions of sex and violence, Beijing is having increasing success in pressuring Hollywood...

LONDON -- The British Broadcasting Corp. faced a dilemma Friday: Would it play "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" when everyone knows the song has become a biting reference to the late Margaret Thatcher? The network's solution: turn the song into a sound...

HONG KONG — When Mabel Cheung, one of this city's leading directors, shot her historical-political drama "The Soong Sisters" in China in the mid-1990s, the nature of the exchange for the co-production was simple: Beijing provided inexpensive...

YANGON, Myanmar — Down a back road in northern Yangon, a sagging teak house fights back the jungle. On the gate, barely noticeable under the weeds, rusty ironwork spells out "A1 Film." Myanmar's first movie studio, once known as the Burma Film Co....

BEIJING — Cecilia Wu, 18, is a self-described film freak. Despite the heavy workload of her senior year of high school here in the Chinese capital, she sees a movie every two or three days and has caught most of the films with Academy Award...

GUANGZHOU, China — Like wedding guests separated across the aisle, the protesters assembled on either side of a gated driveway at the headquarters of the embattled Southern Weekly newspaper. To the right, several dozen supporters of the newspaper...

Salman Rushdie thinks Mo Yan is a patsy of China’s Communist government. I respect Rushdie's work, and his own courage as a defender of artistic freedom. But I'm not sure he's right about Mo Yan. Mo accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature this...

Sharp divisions over the future of the Internet were laid bare Friday as the United States and many of its allies spurned a United Nations telecommunications treaty over fears of government meddling with the Web. Getting involved with the Internet would...

STOCKHOLM (AP) — This year's Nobel literature winner Mo Yan, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with China's Communist Party, defended censorship Thursday as something as necessary as airport security checks. He also suggested he...

Chinese author Mo Yan was announced in October as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature; he's in Sweden now and will be presented with the award Monday. It was at a news conference in Stockholm that Mo made his disappointing statements in support...