9th Panda and Nature Film week features films from around the world

Animal lovers visiting the Ya'an location of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda in Sichuan province this week are in for a pleasant surprise.

They will get to see lots of cuddly pandas and watch animal-themed films, as part of the ongoing 9th Ya'an Panda and Nature Film week.

Sponsored by China Film Archive and the Ya'an municipal government, the event runs through Friday and boasts a series of activities, including a children's film development symposium, film screenings, and displays showing paintings of giant pandas.

One of the week's highlights is that a total of 1,735 films from 109 countries and regions were submitted for the event, with 104 of them selected to be shown, according to the organizing committee.

The 104 films feature themes such as animal protection, the environment, rainforest ecology, wildlife and caring for endangered species.

Thanks to the recommendation of experts from different fields and representatives from the film industry, 42 of the films will be showcased to the public at 48 sites in Ya'an from Monday to Friday, with 57 free screenings, the committee said.

The event aims to promote the concepts of green technology, ecology, low-carbon emissions, and environmental protection.

The inherent green status of Ya'an is quite in line with the green, low-carbon, and environmentally friendly status advocated by the week, said Lin Siwei, deputy director of the China Film Archive.

Ya'an will take this week as an opportunity to make positive contributions to coexistence between humans and nature and accelerate the construction of an important destination for giant panda cultural tourism, mayor Peng Yingmei said. The mention of Ya'an should be synonymous with giant pandas.

Panda enthusiasts already link the mountainous city to Jean-Pierre-Armand David, a French priest.

A naturalist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, David was the first Westerner to discover and document the giant panda in Baoxing, a county under the administration of Ya'an in 1869. He sent a panda specimen from the county to the museum's Henri Milne-Edwards, who in 1870 published a paper declaring the panda a new species.

The fourth National Panda Census in 2013 recorded 1,864 wild pandas in China, with 340 of them living in Ya'an.