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Actress Tang Wei (R) and actor Wu Xiubo perform in a scene from Finding Mr. Right. Photo provided to China Daily
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On a positive note, 2013 is the year good genre films appeared en masse, surprising even insiders with their solid box-office performances. Movies like Finding Mr. Right and
Silent Witness were made by unknown directors, but the expert storytelling techniques won over a significant number of audiences. The result also awakened investors to the reality that top money and top stars may not be enough for a hit movie - if they are not supported by a good script.
The emergence of a large swath of the young population as newconsumers of the cinema experience is largely driven by the real-estate industry, arguably one of the nation's most cash-rich. It is adding 10screens per day in the process of building shopping malls and modernizing the urban landscape. China grew from 1,923 screens in 2003 to around 18,000 by the end of this year, marching over the halfway point of the US number. This means that, per capita, China still has great potential.
The development of recent years is expected to continue for quite a while as the country maintains its pace of urbanization and more people get exposed to the cinematic experience, now fully enhanced with 3-D and giant screens. Nobody is suggesting people have given up their tablets and notebooks as movie-watching platforms, but the movie theater as a preferred platform is gaining fast among the young.
The revival of Chinese cinema started with the Fifth Generation filmmakers in the 1980s, and they shifted gears in the new millennium to big-budget star-studded projects. The Sixth Generation emerged in the 1990s and has been stuck in art-house doldrums, self-imposed or otherwise. Now a new generation, perhaps without the sequential number, is taking over the industry and the diverse backgrounds and styles have made it impossible to group its members together. Of this year's runaway hits, many were directorial debuts or second features, including those by Zhao Wei, Xue Xiaolu, Guo Jingming, Sun Jianjun and Fei Xing, among others. (Last year's Wu'ershan and Xu Zheng fall into the same category, too.) And few of them studied film directing in the Beijing Film Academy, once the sole portal toward filmmaking success.
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