More new films in need to bolster industry hit hard by COVID, experts say

"We didn't expect all the tickets to be sold," said Shi Yijing, manager of the cinema. "Audiences have said they missed the cinema a lot. We, too, have sorely missed them after six months of closure."

A man from the city's Sanlin neighborhood in Pudong district, who asked to remain anonymous, said he arrived at the cinema as early as 9 am as he wanted to be among the first to catch a movie in the theater.

A First Farewell follows the friendship between Isa and Kalbinur, two elementary school students of the Uygur ethnic group in Aksu, Xinjiang. Isa has to experience the first farewell in his lifetime, as his friend is to move to another school. And Isa also needs to say goodbye to his deaf mother because his father wants to send her to a nursing facility.

The film, with dialogue in Uygur and Mandarin, is director Wang Lina's first feature-length production.

At the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in 2019, it won the "Crystal Bear", the best film award in the Generation Kplus section of children's films. It also won awards at international film festivals in Tokyo and Hong Kong later last year.

After COVID-19 was largely contained in China, Wu's team announced on July 13 that A First Farewell would be released on the first day of the reopening of cinemas. However, he said he didn't expect the day of the cinema reopening to come so soon.

"Little time was left, but it took us only half an hour from hearing the news to decide to hold the premiere as originally planned," Wu recalled. "We worked around the clock to contact every link in the industry chain and make sure digital copies of the film could be made and delivered to cinemas just in time."

They even did not have time to design new posters for the film.

Wu was overjoyed that the film was warmly welcomed by cinemas and moviegoers. On Saturday, TV host Wang Han, also a co-producer of the film, hosted a livestreaming broadcast to distribute discount coupons, and 16,000 coupons were booked within hours.

And even for moviegoers without coupons, buying a ticket for A First Farewell seems a bargain this time. The cheapest tickets were sold for 25 yuan ($3.6) in cinemas in big cities, and 20 yuan in smaller cities, a low price not commonly seen before the pandemic.

Wu and some other experts also pointed out that more new films are in need to bolster the hard-hit industry.

"Producers of high-budget major productions continue to wait and see," Rao Shuguang, president of the China Film Critics Association, said in an interview with China Central Television. "But only if these films soon return to screens can people's enthusiasm for watching films be fully reignited. The film industry can only survive when cinemas are lively."