Chloé Zhao at the Deauville American Film Festival in 2015 -

Lionel Cironneau / AP / SIPA

Chloé Zhao has been in the spotlight for a week.

Last Sunday, the filmmaker received the award for Best Director at the Golden Globes for

Nomadland

, making her only the second woman to be a winner in this category after Barbra Streisand in 1984. While her award has helped

shine a

light on her work worldwide, Chloé Zhao is today at the heart of a controversy in China.

Born in Beijing but living in the United States, Chloé Zhao became the first Asian woman in Golden Globes history to be recognized for directing a film.

The award drew admiration in China earlier this week, with media outlets in the country spreading laudatory articles about "the Chinese director", described as "pride".

But remarks attributed to Chloe Zhao in an American magazine in 2013, in which she seemed to criticize her country of origin, then surfaced.

"Lies everywhere"

The director claims there, in a supposed screenshot of the article, that China is a "place where there are lies everywhere".

In another interview which also circulated on social networks, Chloé Zhao indicates that "the United States is now [her] country".

These supposed words of the director do not appear on the sites of the media in question.

But they caused an uproar in China, where Chloe Zhao was described on Saturday as "traitor" by some Internet users against a background of exacerbated nationalism.

The hashtag for

Nomadland 

was meanwhile nowhere to be found on the Weibo social network, but discussions around the film and its director did not seem to be censored.

Nomadland's 

release

in China is officially scheduled for April 23.

The date, however, no longer appeared on the country's main cinema platforms and the film's release is now uncertain,

Variety

magazine reported on Friday

.

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