Philippe muyl biography of christopher

China’s inscrutable selection process for picking its foreign-language Oscar contender became even more obscure in October when it yielded dark-horse entry “The Nightingale,” an intimate low-budget France-China co-production that came out of nowhere to eclipse such front-runners as political drama “Coming Home” from helmer Zhang Yimou, and Diao Yinan’s thriller “Black Coal, Thin Ice.”

Philippe Muyl, the French director of “Nightingale,” was as stunned as anyone.

“We’re all surprised,” he says. “China’s market is about big action movies, not about small films like this one.”

Muyl was picked for “Nightingale” by its Chinese producers, Ning Ning and Steve Rene, because of the pic’s thematic similarities to his 2002 China hit “The Butterfly” — the story