'Birdman' to screen at film festival in Beijing

Hollywood blockbusters that could have little chance of a mainland release will be shown in the capital at a film festival. 

Beijing movie fans will have a chance to see this year's biggest Academy Award winner, Birdman, on the big screen, despite a wider Chinese mainland release of the film looking unlikely.

Beijing International Film Festival committee announced on Monday that it has selected more than 300 films from 1,524 candidates from 103 countries, including recent Oscar winners Birdman, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Imitation Game.

The movies, with the final list to be determined on March 20, will be screened across 23 Beijing cinemas and eight universities from April 16 to 23. Ticket prices will range from 20 yuan ($3.19) to 80 yuan for blockbusters in Imax screens.

Each movie is usually screened four times, though the committee said popular movies may have an extended run, depending on negotiations with producers.

China's top film regulator and major cinemas have not made any indication that Birdman will be released in the mainland, leading some domestic media outlets to speculate that the black comedy may not be screened nationwide.

Zhang Yi, deputy head of the film panorama department of the festival, estimates that this year's Academy Awards' winners have a slim chance of being screened across the mainland, because the Chinese distributors have to consider the limited quota of foreign films annually allowed in cinemas.

Only 34 foreign films can be screened in mainland cinemas every year, according to policies from the country's top regulator for the sector.

"Birdman has multiple big names behind it. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, its Mexican director, and the lead actor, Michael Keaton, are well-known faces to Chinese movie insiders," says Zhang.

He says the movies were selected before the United States awards season.

US director Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel captured Beijing's attention when it was announced as the opening film of the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival.

Picking up four statuettes, including one for best picture, at the 87th Academy Awards, Birdman, is a strange tale of a Hollywood "superhero" actor attempting to make a comeback via Broadway.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, winner of best costume, makeup and hairstyling, is about a fussy hotel concierge and his loyal lobby-boy protegee and their series of misadventures.

Historical thriller The Imitation Game won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

It is expected to lure ticket buyers thanks to its male lead, Benedict Cumberbatch, who won many Chinese fans for his role depicting the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes in the BBC hit series Sherlock.

"We pitched the popular blockbusters and most talked-about productions months before the American awards season and made the selection based on research of box-office performances and the responses of professional critics," says China Film Archive director Sun Xianghui.

Five movies with "high artistic value" but "very little chance to make it in the mainstream market" will also be screened during the seven-day event, according to Sun Xianghui.

They include the romance thriller Gone Girl, the comedy-drama Inside Llewyn Davis directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and Russian movie Leviathan.

Most of the movies have obtained high scores on the popular Chinese movie review websites, such as Birdman with 8 points of 10 and The Grand Budapest Hotel, with 8.7 on douban.com.

The movies are currently available on some major video-streaming sites, but experts insist that the best way to see the films is on the big screen.

"Many professional critics and insiders would watch most movies on videotapes decades ago. In recent years they started watching them on high-quality disks. As for the self-described hardcore Hollywood movie fans, most of them watch movies online," says Zuo Heng, deputy director of cinema studies at the China Film Archives.

"Film is a big-screen production with mixed characteristics, such as magnificent scenes, special effects and sound effects. A real movie culture must have viewers in cinemas. The rapidly expanding market will speed up the spread of this culture," he says.

This year, a film critic-guided system will be introduced for the first time since the festival was launched in 2011.

Because 2015 marks 120 years since the world's first movie and the 110th year of the first Chinese movie, the festival also plans to screen some classical works from film masters who were born 100 years ago.

Films from US actor-director Orson Welles and Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, both born in 1915, will be screened at the festival.