Chinese films charm audiences with better storytelling

Storytelling

Blockbuster domestic films have combined excellence in the embodiment of values, artistic quality and market competitiveness, which is well demonstrated by the films screened around the National Day and the Spring Festival, Yin said.

By putting the spotlight on ordinary people, My People, My Country, the National Day holiday box office champion, adopts a form of storytelling completely different from previous films of the same genre.

Depicting legendary moments from the perspectives of the ordinary makes My People, My Country a patriotic film that resonates with viewers, Li Qian, a Beijing-based screenwriter, told Xinhua.

It stars Huang Bo as an engineer who manages to make an electric flagpole for the founding ceremony of the People's Republic of China on Oct 1, 1949, Ge You as a Beijing taxi driver who gets a ticket to the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games but offers it to a boy who lost his father in a deadly earthquake that year, and Zhang Yi as a researcher who contributes to China's nuclear science research.

"Either based on real-life events or inspired by historical moments," this year's blockbuster patriotic films "are works that are in step with the pulse of the times," Li said.

The China Film Archive commended the films for broadening the genre and lifting the popularity of patriotic films.

The overall audience satisfaction with Chinese films screened during the National Day holiday reached 88.6 points, the highest ever recorded by the survey, which has so far covered more than 30 seasonal and holiday screening periods, the archive said.