Documentaries will form one of most important activities in the 7th Beijing International Film Festival, with a wide variety of offerings, the organizers have revealed.
The festival, with the core value of exploring and promoting crossover interaction, includes activities that involve evaluation, exhibition, forum and salon.
The documentary section will be jointly hosted by the Beijing International Documentary Center and the China International Communication Center, who have designed three different activities.
The festival this year has invited French documentary master Jacques Perrin to be honorary president of the Documentary Section and his new work showing the Earth's "Four Seasons" will serve as the opening documentary. An academic seminar about Perrin's nature films and a press conference will also be held.
To echo the national strategy, the theme of the Belt and Road also forms art of festival this time. A series of activities like the Belt and Road Media Collaboration Forum, the Belt and Road International Communications Roundtable, the Belt and Road Documentary Exhibition, will be held by the China International Communication Centers, Beijing TV, media and embassy personnel from various Belt and Road neighboring countries.
This Documentary Section will also focus on winter sports and outdoor sports areas. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Beijing Municipal Bureau of Sports and Beijing TV Documentary Channel will jointly host the first Winter Olympic Games Picture Forum. The Beijing International Documentary Center and outdoor sports associations and clubs from home and abroad will also host the first China's Outdoor Sports Documentatry.
Traditional activities in the Documentary Section of the 7th Beijing International Film Festival will also surely grab much visitors' attention.
There are five awards in the documentary Section, namely, Best International Long Documentary, Best National Long Documentary, Best Sino-Foreign Co-production, Best National Series, and Committee Special Recommendation. A total of 223 documentaries have been selected for review, many of which have already received awards in the Oscar Ceremony, the Berlin Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and IDFA. Sino-Foreign Co-productions in the Documentary Section have improved both in number and in quality, revealing the progress being made with this genre. Final judgment will be given by three international judges from Germany, Australia and Japan, and four national experts.
Experts believe these international high-quality works will effectively broaden horizons in local documentary creation, and elevate the filming level.
The Documentary Section this time will reach a new high in the scale of screening. Ten excellent Chinese and foreign documentaries will be shown at cinemas in Beijing, four of which sold out on the first day of being available. Among the 10 films to be screened, six will have their China premier.
One of them, "The Ivory Game," was nominated for Best Documentary Feature of the 89th Academy Awards, and the Austrian Production Company involved has made a special version for its first documentary showcase in China.
Apart from cinema screenings, the Documentary Section will also hold 12 exchange activities, inviting film casts to the National Library of China, Beijing Normal University and the Beijing Film Academy.
By then, Jacques Perrin will take the opening film, Les Saisons, of all documentaries to the show site in Beijing Normal University; the producer and director of "The Ivory Game" will come from Los Angeles and Germany respectively to attend the film premiere in National Library of China; the Asian premiere and cast exchange activities of "Casting JonBenet," which was nominated for Best Documentary of the Sundance Film Festival in 2017, will also be held.
Besides, Documentary Section has also invited film casts, protagonist archetypes, Chinese and foreign well-known filmmakers as well as representatives of foreign embassy and consulates, to the show and cast meeting of the following films: "Mirror," "Xinjiang," "The Keriya," "I'm In," "Immovable Land," "Masters in Forbidden City," "This Is Life," "A Century with Cars," and "Born to Die."
The screening section of the documentaries seeks to enable people to see more excellent works, making industrialized exploration and summary for the documentary photography to be shown in cinema.
In the forum part, the "Annual Forum of Documentary Industry in China" organized jointly by Doc China Council, Beijing Normal University and the Documentary Channel of Beijing TV Station (BTV) is an important annual activity in the Chinese documentary field.
In this activity, "The Annual Report Blue Book Presenting Development of Chinese Documentary" will be released, while the launching and Contract Signing Ceremony of TV simulcasting for the program "Doc China" will be held. The forum is going to invite several leaders involved, Chinese and foreign guests, experts and scholars and employees to be present, to release important data and breaking news, and discuss the current situation of documentary industry's development in China.
The Documentary Section's Salon Part this year will invite many institutions to participate, providing rich and colorful contents, including "Visual Anthropology: audio literature and public communication forum"; Award Ceremony of Documentary Competition "Record of Youth" for undergraduates in the Pacific Rim; Special Screening of Banff Mountain Film Festival; micro documentary salon "Global Creators", etc.
