Jackie Chan's "CZ12" aka "Chinese Zodiac" was screened at New Delhi's Siri Fort Auditorium on Saturday to kick off the India-China Film Festival aimed at deepening cultural understanding between the two countries. Aamir Khan's "Dangal", which was hugely successful in China, was the second movie to be screened at the festival.
Earlier on Friday, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj officially inaugurated the film festival as part of the India-China High Level Mechanism on Cultural and People-to-People Exchanges.
The three-day festival runs till Monday and will showcase a total of seven films including four Chinese and three Indian films, according to a press release from India's Ministry of Information.
Besides "Dangal," Bengali film "Maacher Jhol" and Priyanka Chopra's maiden Marathi production "Ventilator" make up the Indian list, while the other Chinese films at the festival include "Brotherhood of Blades," "Lost in Thailand," and "Wolf Totem."
A screenshot of a tweet by China's Ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui.
"Films are loved by our people and play a great role in bringing us closes," Luo Zhaohui, China's Ambassador to India, said in a tweet.
"Bollywood films have certainly sparked an interest among Chinese youth to learn more about India, and as media I think we need to produce more stories and more movies that really touches the people of our two countries," Huang Xingwei, senior editor at Xinhua News Agency, said while participating at the third China-India Media Forum earlier on Friday.
He said Bollywood movies have been the window to India for many Chinese for decades.
"My connect with India is through Indian movies. In early 1980s when I was a boy I watched "Awara" – produced in 1951 – and was quite impressed. The music, the dances and the actress, they were all so beautiful," he quipped, adding that he vividly remembers songs from the movie playing at street shops in China in those days.
"They played it loudly on the tape-recorder to attract more customers," he recalled.
Stating that the trend has revived in recent times with the success of many Bollywood movies in China such as "Dangal," "Secret Superstar" and "Hindi Medium," Huang said: "The Chinese audience connects to Indian films as they represent social issues that are similar. Same worries, same anxieties, same troubles such as fighting for children's better education."