Beijing afloat on April sea of films

In a feast for cinema enthusiasts, the 15th Beijing International Film Festival will kick off on April 18 and run until April 26, with a roster of nearly 300 movies from around the world, organizers revealed.

Jiang Wen, the filmmaker known for blockbusters Let the Bullets Fly and Hidden Man, is jury president for the Tiantan Award, the festival's top honor.

Well-known jurors from Chinese-language cinema include Joan Chen, the Chinese American actress who shot to fame in Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar-winning feature The Last Emperor, Hong Kong art director Tim Yip, known for his costume design for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and actress Ni Ni, whose recent hit was the suspense film Lost in the Stars.

Foreign jurors include British director David Yates, Finnish director Teemu Nikki, and Swiss director-actor Vincent Perez.

Xu Tao, executive deputy secretary-general of the festival's organizing committee, says the event marks the first time Yates — who is best known for directing the last four Harry Potter and three Fantastic Beasts films — will serve as juror of an international film festival.

She adds that all seven jurors have collectively won 39 awards at A-list international film festivals, bringing this event's 15-year cumulative total to 508 awards won by jury panel members, further solidifying its credentials.

Ten Tiantan awards will be shortlisted from the 15 nominated films, which in turn were chosen from 1,794 submissions from 103 countries and regions, a remarkable 18.9 percent increase on last year's 1,509 films.

Three Chinese movies have earned nominations: actress Ma Li's Better Me, Better You, about a rural carer's bond with an elderly woman; Deep in the Mountains, which follows a police officer's investigation into multiple crimes; Trapped, the account of a small town's fight against 44 armed gangsters.

Other nominated foreign films also include Apollo by Day Athena by Night (Turkiye), BAUS: The Ship's Voyage Continues (Japan) and Frieda's Case (Switzerland).

The Forward Future Section, the festival's second competition category which seeks to solicit the first or second films by new directors, has invited Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr to chair the panel, with the other four jurors being actor Song Yang, actress Jin Chen, actor Hiroyuki Tanaka, who is better known as Sabu, and Swiss director-writer Cyril Schaublin.

Nearly 300 Chinese and foreign films will be screened multiple times at 34 cinemas in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, including one with immersive facilities.

Lin Siwei, deputy director of the China Film Archive, says that this year marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of the first Chinese film, Dingjun Mountain. In celebration, the festival will hold a special exhibition of Chinese films and screen 10 Peking Opera films at the Daguanlou Cinema, one of Beijing's earliest theaters.

As the year also marks the 130th anniversary of the world's first cinema and the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the festival will show a number of war-related films, including French film Shoah (1985), American movie The Thin Red Line (1998), and German historical war drama Downfall (2004).

Another highlight of the festival will be a retrospective of classic films by legendary masters, including a special screening dedicated to Robert Altman — the late American director who received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2006.

"The screening selection not only focused on classics but also highlighted cutting-edge new releases. We hope it will serve as a tribute to cinema's everlasting magic and allow the audience to have a more immersive experience (with special facilities like virtual reality equipment)," says Lin.

Ne Zha 2, the most commercially successful Chinese film, which has stormed into the global box-office list as the fifth highest-grossing film of all time, will feature in an exhibition of hand-drawn posters by director Yang Yu, who is better known as Jiaozi.

It was also announced that Chen Sicheng, a filmmaker who has contributed to the industrialization of Chinese cinema, will be president of the final jury for Project Pitches, a section that seeks to identify and nurture promising new domestic creative forces.

Inspired by the coiling dragon caisson ceiling of the Forbidden City's Wanchun Pavilion, the festival poster's kaleidoscopic pattern symbolizes cinema's focus on the many facets of the world, according to the organizers.