2004 Zhang Yimou

Our first Coolidge Award was original and challenging in itself! Bestowing the Award on one of the world's most cinematic directors meant getting him from Beijing to Brookline and creating two days of events appropriate to a non-English speaking filmmaker of international renown. Thanks to a great team effort and enormous good will, the event was a wonderful success.

Our outreach to the local Chinese community was enthusiastically received and our 600 seat theater was packed. We had a great turnout for the series of retrospective screenings and terrifically engaging seminars led by Professors Eileen Chow (Harvard University), Roy Grundmann (Boston University), and Xueping Zhong (Tufts University).

At the culmination of the gala ceremony, Zhang Yimou accepted the Award with grace and sincere praise for the Coolidge. With the help of Brookline filmmaker Carma Hinton, who translated for him, he spoke eloquently about what it meant to him to receive this special honor from a theater that contributes so much to the local community as well as the larger film community. He also projected that in five or ten years, the Coolidge Award would be the prize "most sought after" by the world's filmmakers. Those words made everyone who worked on the Award program feel that our efforts were more than repaid. In addition to the Award ceremony, Mr. Zhang introduced a special advance screening of his epic film HERO and invited the audience to join him in an in-depth discussion about the production and issues raised by that film.