Beijing Film Festival Removes ‘Call Me By Your Name’ From Lineup

There won’t be any peaches in Beijing.

Call Me By Your Name, which received the Oscar for best adapted screenplay earlier this month, has been withdrawn from the Beijing International Film Festival for an undisclosed reason, Reuters reported.

While homosexuality is not illegal in China, one 2017 survey named Beijing the least welcoming city for LGBT people out of 100 cities ranked. Many activists say the LGBTQ community in China still struggles for basic acceptance.

This isn’t the first time Call Me By Your Name has been banned in another country. A screening of the film was also recently banned in Tunisia.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t without its share of controversy in America. Conservatives online balked at the age gap between the film’s leads, which led several LGBTQ outlets to point out that there were several uncontroversial heterosexual films where the age gap was as wide or larger than Name’s.

The film’splace on the blacklist is similar to the far-less-sexual Beauty and the Beast, which was banned in Kuwait and temporarily blocked in Malaysia for its “exclusively gay moment” where two male characters danced together for less than a second. One Alabama drive-in theatre infamously turned down screening the film for the moment, as well.

Organizers of the Beijing festival declined to comment to Reuters.

“This movie is in deviation from the policy environment in China,” Wu Jian, a Beijing-based film analyst, told Reuters. Jian added that it was “quite embarrassing for China” that the film wouldn’t be screened.