Four years after the immortal words, “There’s been a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture,” Damien Chazelle’s jazzsplainer La La Land continues its reign of terror. Last week, a new state-backed movie musical called The Wings of Songs dropped in Chinese theaters, and both the Guardian and the New York Times have reported that it is part of a government propaganda campaign to silence and disavow reports of forced labor, “reeducation” camps, and ethnic genocide against Uyghur Muslims in the province of Xinjiang. “Far from being oppressed, the musical seems to say, the Uyghurs and other minorities are singing and dancing happily in colorful dress, a flashy take on a tired Chinese stereotype about the region’s minorities that Uyghur rights activists quickly denounced,” reads the Times’ description of the film. The Wings of Songs also scrubs its Uyghur characters of any Islamic signifiers, depicting them as fully assimilated. And we have La La Land to “thank” for it. According to the Guardian, the state-run Global Times “reported that overseas blockbusters such as La La Land have ‘inspired Chinese studios’ to produce their own domestic hits.”
