Using movies to forge bonds

Kung fu star Jackie Chan attends the closing ceremony of the Third Silk Road International Film Festival in Xi'an. [Photo by Huo Yan/China Daily]

With 676 films, this cinematic event is doing an admirable job to reinvigorate cultural exchanges among countries along the old network of trade routes and beyond. Raymond Zhou reports.

The five-day Silk Road International Film Festival wrapped up on Sept 23 in Shaanxi's provincial capital Xi'an.

Xi'an, which was known as Chang'an during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) when it was China's capital, was the starting point of the Silk Road, which went across Central Asia and all the way to Rome. The film festival named after this ancient network of trade routes is an attempt to reinvigorate cultural exchanges among countries along this road and beyond it.

For this third edition of the festival, 676 films were in competition, of which two dozen received various nominations.

The best picture winners were The Oldman Dogs, a made-in-Xi'an film (but with a story set in Xinjiang) about an old man and his dogs; Money, an American-Spanish co-production and Xuan Zang, a thematically relevant bio-pic about the Tang Dynasty monk whose pilgrimage to India for Buddhist scriptures has spawned the fantasy retelling of the Monkey King tale, now a staple of the Chinese screen.