Film about Chinese man, murdered for standing up to shoddy developers, hits snag as family threatens to sue
- The story of a man murdered in 2003 for coming forward against poor construction quality, is planned for a film adaptation
- However, his family claims any film would harm his reputation and has threatened legal action
The family of a man who was killed and buried under a playground by several mobsters in central China in 2003 has pledged to sue a film production team that plans to make a movie about the high-profile case.
According to Chinese law, the reputation of the dead is also protected and the relatives can launch legal action when it’s believed that their posthumous reputation has been damaged.
Zhou Zhaocheng, the family’s lawyer, warned on Weibo over the weekend that he believed Chinese director Ah Nian and his supporting team should get the family’s authorisation to shoot the film in advance, otherwise they will file a lawsuit.
The case of Deng, a middle school teacher in Hunan’s Huaihua city, rocked China in 2019 when his remains were found by police 16 years after he went missing amid a row with the school principal and the contractor of the school’s construction project.
It only came to light when the contractor was seized by authorities for other crimes during a crackdown on triad gangs. Previously police had allegedly refused to investigate because of the murderers’ connections, despite Deng’s family’s pleas.
“What we mainly worry about is that there could be untrue events in the film because it’s adapted … we don’t want to see something inconsistent with the truth,” Deng Ling, the murdered man’s daughter, told Jiemian News.
She demanded the production team consult the family about what Deng was like and let them know how the film would tell his story, however, she also said she didn’t want her father’s story to become a movie at all.
“Who would be willing to put his own family’s matter on show to the world? But since everyone knows about it now, we can’t stop people making it into a television series or film,” she said.
The shooting of the film, titled Playground has been approved by Chinese authorities and will start in October.
The family only learned about the plan when a poster of the film went viral on Chinese social media earlier this month, Deng Ling said.
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Ah Nian, one of China’s sixth-generation directors, responded in a statement on August 13 that the film script: “basically shows what truly happened” and has “not twisted the facts or made-up plots”.
“With the support of local authorities, we read all documents related to this case, and created the script Playground based on facts including the court’s ruling,” he said.
However, after contacting related departments, the family’s lawyer found that the production team had never communicated with them on the issue, nor had the legal department provided any case file to them for reading, according to a statement issued by Zhou’s firm, Beijing Yifa Law Firm on Friday.
Deng, a teacher at Xinhuang No 1 Middle School who was assigned to oversee a playground building project in 2002, was killed and buried in the construction site the next year after reporting to education authorities alleging that the work used fewer materials than it needed and led to poor quality. He had been treated as a missing person until 2019.
