Funding festival-worthy films
Industry insiders discuss luring audiences back to cinemas by focusing on productions with better stories and lower budgets, Zhang Kun reports.
To celebrate new achievements in Chinese films and showcase more than 400 international productions, the 27th Shanghai International Film Festival opened on June 12 in commemoration of 120 years of Chinese cinema.
Founded in 1993, this is China's only competitive film festival approved by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations.
This year, the Golden Goblet Awards competition received an unprecedented 3,900 submissions from 119 countries and regions. Forty-nine are short-listed, among which 38 are making their global premiere at the festival.
She's Got No Name, a film by Hong Kong-based director Peter Ho-Sun Chan, opened the festival.
Depicting a real-life incident in Shanghai in the early 1900s, the film was also screened during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Chan reworked the film after Cannes, making the bold decision to split it into two parts. The film's first installment premiered at Shanghai Film City on Saturday, bringing in a record-breaking box-office income of 580,000 yuan ($80,713) for highest single ticket price, according to Liu Yina, head of the film department of publicity under the municipal administration. The movie will be released nationwide on Saturday.
