Theme
To celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the establishment of dialogue partnership between China and ASEAN, the festival aims promote greater understanding of Chinese film art among ASEAN society.

The Centennial of Chinese Cinema
The Film festival will expose Malaysians to the cinematic success of Chinese Cinema (1905-2005) and to allow the Malaysian public to enjoy the artistic accomplishment of Chinese film making through the free screening of over 60 classic Chinese movies. “Classic from A century of Chinese Cinema” --The festival will provide a cinematic feast of the best of Chinese movies that dates back from 1905 to 2005, these 60 movies will be screened in 20 venues in Klang Valley and throughout Malaysia, along with seminars and forums held on film appreciation and the study of Standard Putonghua.

Background
Cinema made its debut in China in 1896, just one year after the Lumière brothers premiered the art form in France. The first Chinese film was made in 1905 when a Beijing photo studio recorded a scene from a Peking opera called "Conquering Jun Mountain." These early years of Chinese film are chronicled in the multimedia musical "Songs of Light and Shadow," which uses a dizzying array of song, dance, video, film, dialogue and drama to tell the story of a fictional moviemaker whose life spans the entire film era.

The advent of the cinematic age caused considerable consternation in China, especially among opera aficionados who feared that it would threaten their favored art form. Even so, the new medium was quickly absorbed into the culture. Being compared to the age-old art of shadow puppetry, Cinema was translated into Chinese as the "electric shadow play."

China's first film studio was founded by an American named Benjamin Brodsky, and it released the first short feature film, "The Difficult Couple," in 1913.

By the 1920s and 1930s, cinema became wildly popular, and celebrities like Butterfly Hu and Zhou Xuan became household names. This era is chronicled in the musical by cabaret performances and an amusing play in which silent film actors utter number sequences rather than words. However, the old movies themselves are far more interesting and captivating.

Chinese cinema evolved from romantic comedies and emotional dramas of the 1930s to the war movies of the 1940s, to the politically inspired films of the 1950s and early 1960s - with their long, languorous shots of wheat fields and industrial smokestacks - to the still shocking silence of the Cultural Revolution era, when no films other than political documentaries were made for six straight years. The event also underscored the great importance of musics in Chinese film; indeed, China's national anthem, "The March of the Volunteers," came from the 1930s film "Children of the Storm."

The post-Cultural Revolution renaissance of Chinese cinema under such directors as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige was a well-known story. But it was given a unique spin in this political event with the inclusion of a number of films from 1980s Taiwan and a long clip from "Titanic," which has apparently been made an honorary Chinese film by the virtue of its popularity there.