Beijing afloat on April sea of films

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).