A Noticeable Void Among Nominees : Movies: China’s ‘Ju Dou’ was the only Oscar contender not represented at directors’ symposium.

Zhang Yimou, director of “Ju Dou,” was notable by his absence at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Saturday morning symposium honoring representatives of all five pictures nominated for best foreign language film. “Ju Dou” is not only the first Chinese film to be nominated for an Oscar but also is the first nominated foreign language film without any official representation at the Academy Awards festivities.

Miramax, the film’s American distributor, has sent a letter, signed by many top Hollywood names, to the People’s Republic of China’s ministry of radio, film and television requesting that Zhang be allowed to attend the Academy Awards and so has Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan of New York, whose letter was signed by 10 Senate colleagues. But director George Schaefer, the symposium moderator, stated that Zhang will not be at the Oscar ceremonies tonight.

Miramax senior publicist Cynthia Swartz confirmed on Sunday that “despite our repeated efforts to persuade the Chinese government to allow Zhang to attend the Oscar ceremonies, including a letter to Li Peng, premier of China, we learned as of Sunday night Tokyo time that official permission has not been granted.” Swartz cited letters from Zhang’s production companies that said the director is not tied up on current film production and would be free to travel. Swartz said this “directly contradicts the Chinese government’s official response to the academy that Zhang is ‘too busy’ to fly to Los Angeles.”

“Ju Dou,” which tells of a beautiful young woman falling in love with the nephew of a brutal old man, is uncommonly erotic for a Chinese film, and this is widely believed to be the reason why, in the wake of the turmoil following the Tian An Men Square massacre, the China Film Bureau, which submitted the film to the academy as China’s official entry, did an about face and tried unsuccessfully to withdraw the film from competition. (Foreign language film committee chairman Fay Kanin later explained that although the Chinese government has apparently curtailed the release of “Ju Dou” in China, that to qualify for Oscar entry a film has to be shown commercially in its native country only once.)

Despite the Chinese government’s official position, a representative of the Los Angeles office of China Film Export accepted a certificate of nomination on behalf of the film from Karl Malden, academy president, on Saturday night during an academy-hosted cocktail reception honoring the five nominated foreign language films.

Schaefer came with an interview with Zhang from which he read excerpts, interspersing them with his discussions with the representatives of the other four nominated films: directors Xavier Koller (“Journey of Hope,” Switzerland), Michael Verhoeven (“The Nasty Girl,” Germany), Jean-Paul Rappeneau (“Cyrano de Bergerac,” France) and producer Angelo Rizzoli (“Open Doors,” Italy). “Open Doors” director Gianni Amelio was shooting another picture and could not attend.

Citing as evidence that 1990 was “an extraordinarily good year” for foreign films, Schaefer remarked that among the 36 submissions were such close runner-ups as the Soviet Union’s “Taxi Blues” and Austria’s remarkable, not-yet-released “Requiem for Dominic.”

Koller told of how reading of the fate of a Turkish family attempting to enter Switzerland illegally compelled him to make “Journey of Hope,” and Rappeneau remarked that he and his co-adapter, Jean-Claude Carriere, discovered their visual images within the very text of the Edmond Rostand play, significantly written just as films were beginning to be exhibited in Paris. Rizzoli explained that although “Open Doors,” about a judge attempting to save a confessed multiple murderer from execution, is set in the fascist Italy of 1937, the question it raises as to whether the position of judges is to be independent of politics applies to his country today.

Verhoeven, whose film is based on a young woman’s real-life attempt to confront her hometown with its Nazi past, revealed that his darkly satirical “Nasty Girl” was met with “complete silence” when it played in the actual city, Passau. “In the rest of Germany, the young people accepted the film very well. Among older audiences there were those who felt I should have done such a film with more seriousness--and a few who said I shouldn’t have done the film at all.”

Fay Kanin became the first non-directing member of the academy allowed to attend the luncheon. “I feel as though Martha (Coolidge) and I have wandered into a great stag party,” she quipped. Other guests were directors John Badham, Ronald Neame, George Sidney, Stanley Donen, John Schlesinger, Arthur Hiller, Barbet Schroeder, Daniel Petrie, Norman Jewison, Joseph Sargent, Robert Ellis Miller, John Frankenheimer, Richard Brooks and Billy Wilder.