Members of the film crew of a domestic cartoon featuring Afanti (fourth from left) arrive at the Shanghai International Film Festival on Saturday. Afanti, a hero in Uygur folk stories, is a popular cartoon character in China. [Photo by Ding Ting/Xinhua]

Screenings will be offered in countries of Belt and Road.

Thirty film festivals from countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative celebrated the formation of a new alliance on Saturday, the opening day of the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Called the Belt and Road Film Festival Alliance, it will be a platform for joint projects and cinematic cultural exchanges.

The alliance is of "paramount importance for all filmmakers", as it provides the opportunity to showcase films in these countries, said Carla Mooney, an Irish producer and actress who co-founded the Silk Road International Film Festival, a member of the new alliance.

The new alliance "opens up a whole new world for people to connect, and for filmmakers - and filmgoers as well - to learn of other countries' cinematic influences," she said.

The only A-category international film festival in China, the Shanghai event is one of the largest in Asia. This year it will run until June 25. Five hundred films from home and abroad will be shown in 45 theaters in Shanghai.

China's booming film market has attracted 3,447 films applying to participate in the Shanghai film festival from 108 countries and regions this year.

More than 1,300 of them have come from countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, and 154 have been accepted for the Shanghai festival this year.

"We are familiar with Hollywood films and learned a lot from their productions," said Yang Jianguo, a senior adviser for the Shanghai International Film Festival, adding that there is much more to learn from other filmmaking all over the world.

"The countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative all have their unique ways of telling stories, and the films reflect a rich culture and life wisdom," he said.

Thirteen feature movies, including two from China, will compete for the Golden Goblet Award at the Shanghai festival this year, judged by a jury led by Chinese actor and director Jiang Wen.

There have been so many technological improvements through the past decade that "people are making better films than what we used to make", Jiang said on Sunday, introducing the judges, including Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildiko Enyedi, Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu, Japanese director Naomi Kawase, American producer David Permut and Chinese actors Chang Chen and Qin Hailu.

Jiang said his criteria as head of the jury for the Golden Goblet Award is that a film must "either have great originality, or it gives an exceptionally good rendering of unoriginal ideas".

Chang, an award-winning actor from Taiwan, said he believed the film-watching experience is the most important criterion, and he would be judging the films by "whether you are touched, whether the key idea of a film is accurately presented and reaches the heart of audiences".