In another attempt of a much stricter regulation of what people can see in cinemas and what directors and producers are not allowed to show on the big screen, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has banned director Lou Ye from making movies in his native country for the following five years.

The official reason given for the ban was that he submitted his latest movie, 'Summer Palace' to the Cannes Festival without asking the state's permission first. Lou Ye, who won the main prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000 (with another controversial movie that got banned in China), participated in the Cannes competition with the only Asian production this year.

He also stated that he planned to change its sexually explicit content to meet the censors' demands. Unfortunately, he wasn't given the chance to operate the intended modifications, as SARFT announced that the movie will be seized and all income gotten from it confiscated.

'Summer Palace' deals with a love story placed against the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests that were muffled by military force, leaving behind hundreds of dead. Besides the sexually charged scenes that appear in the movie, there is the suspicion that Chinese authorities were not satisfied with the way the protests were presented, considering they are still claiming military force was necessary to stop the 'counter-revolutionary riots'.

But Ye says, in his defense, that the movie was not criticizing the action, being just autobiographical: 'I wanted to tell the story because in 1989 I was myself a student at Peking University and was involved in a romance'.

But SARFT remains unmoved by the argument and declares the five-year ban unalterable. The producer for 'Summer Palace', Nai An, also got the same verdict for his work on the movie.