At the 13th Silk Road International Film Festival in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, Egyptian animator and filmmaker Mohamed Ghazala sat down with CGTN's Zhang Meng to talk about a remarkable year for animation – 100 years since German animator Lotte Reiniger's "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," the first feature-length animated film made by a woman, and 90 years since the first Egyptian animation.

With 2026 marking 70 years of China-Egypt diplomatic relations, Ghazala connected that history to the present, stressing the cultural kinship between two of the world's oldest civilizations. Regardless of distance and language, he believes, "we have a lot of common ground. The storytelling in Chinese cinema is quite close to ours, because it concerns the human aspect first."