Movie industry moving forward

Last year, the number fell slightly to 850. Coupled with other genres, including science education and documentaries, China's annual production reached 1,037 films in 2019.

"When I started to work as a filmmaker in the late 1990s, China produced only around 100 feature films a year," Jia says.

"The rapid growth provides a wide selection for local movie enthusiasts and lays the foundation for more international exchanges."

Domestic films' market share and box-office takings have also grown rapidly.

In 2016, domestic films earned a total of 26.7 billion yuan, accounting for 58.3 percent of overall box-office revenues. The two figures respectively rose to 37.9 billion and 62.2 percent in 2019, indicating domestic films are becoming more popular among local theatergoers.

Each of the highest-grossing blockbusters from 2016 to this year has been a homegrown work, including Stephen Chow's The Mermaid, Wu Jing's Wolf Warrior II, Dante Lam's Operation Red Sea, Jiao Zi's Ne Zha and Guan Hu's The Eight Hundred.

Despite the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, Chinese films had grossed 11 billion yuan as of Oct 15, accounting for nearly 85 percent of total sales, which were boosted by the war epic The Eight Hundred and National Day blockbusters My People, My Homeland and Jiang Ziya: Legend of Deification.

Director Lu Chuan, known for City of Life and Death, says: "Statistics can tell us everything. In the early 2000s, China's annual box-office take accounted for a small proportion of the global total. But since 2016, it has caught up (with the world's top players)."