The Ecuadorian House of Culture and the Chinese Embassy in Quito
are presenting a festival of prize-winning Chinese films, beginning
with I Beg You To Praise Me on Wednesday, the House said in
a bulletin.
The film, which won director Huang Jiaxin the award for Best
Script at the 2005 Shanghai Film Festival, describes a journalist's
investigation into a story told to him by a reader.
The bulletin said that prize-winning Chinese directors remain
little-known in Latin America, which is saturated by commercial
cinemas, adding that the seven films in the festival, which runs
until October 21, will be shown in Mandarin with Spanish
subtitles.
"China's citizens are attracted by real-life cinema, related to
the daily life of common people," said the bulletin. "These
directors promote a cinema which shows ways of rethinking and
confronting reality, with the alternatives offered by
modernization," it added.
On Thursday, Zhang Yimou's film Riding Alone for Thousands of
Miles and Feng Xiaogang's Cellular Phone will be shown
at the festival. China is the world's third-largest film-making
nation, said the bulletin.
Zhong Dafeng, director of China's Cinema Academy, said in August
that the nation has produced 10,000 films since 1905, filming 350
features in 2006 alone. He estimated there would be 400 films shot
in 2007, 100 of which will be using high-definition digital
technology.
(Xinhua News Agency October 11, 2007)
