Hundred Flowers confirms culture is hot ticket

Insider insights

Aside from the award ceremony, a range of activities including themed forums and film screenings were held from Friday to Sunday as a platform for industry insiders to exchange ideas on the future of the Chinese film industry.

Lu Shaoyang, president of the working committee of film theory and critic at the China Film Association and a professor at Peking University, said that a survey they conducted revealed that the primary audience of regular cinemagoers is aged between 25 and 30.

Reflecting on a similar survey conducted five years ago that showed the primary audience at the time was aged between 20 and 24, Lu said this suggests that the mainstream cinema audience is the same group, only now five years older, which hints at the potential loss of younger viewers.

He added that some directors have worked hard to attract a younger audience, exemplified by films that explore hotly debated topics or which incorporate short-video elements, a format popular among the younger generation, in feature-length films that typically run for two hours.

Yin Hong, the vice-chairman of the China Film Association and a professor at Tsinghua University, said that the domestic audience has shown a trend toward recognizing and preferring films about Chinese culture or local themes, which demonstrates the improvement in the storytelling and artistic quality of Chinese films.