Published : 21/09/2025
On 21st September 1989, the first China Film Festival was grandly opened in Beijing.
The first China Film Festival was one of the most important events in China's film industry in the 40 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China.
During the first film festival, over 500 representatives from the film industries of Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao jointly reviewed and summarised the tortuous yet glorious path that Chinese cinema had taken in the 40 years since the founding of the nation.
The feature film The Birth of New China (《開國大典》) and the documentary This Day Forty Years Ago (《四十年前的這一天》) were screened at the opening ceremony as the festival's leading works. When the directors of The Birth of New China, Li Qiankuan (李前寬) and Xiao Guiyun (肖桂雲), led the main cast onto the stage, the entire hall erupted in enthusiastic applause.
It was widely believed by all sectors that this cinematic masterpiece, which brought together important modern Chinese political figures such as Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chiang Kai-shek in one film, marked a significant breakthrough for Chinese films on major historical themes in terms of their ideological and artistic qualities.
Chen Haosu (陳昊蘇), then Vice Minister of the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television and Chairman of the China Film Festival Organising Committee, said at the opening ceremony that China's filmmakers would use this film festival to express their deep and warm blessings to the great Party, the great people and the great socialist motherland, and to present a generous gift for the 40th anniversary of the PRC with new achievements in developing a national, socialist film culture.
The festival also selected the Top 10 Movie Stars of the 40 years since the founding of the PRC; they were Zhao Dan, Cui Wei, Bai Yang, Sun Daolin, Yu Lan, Wang Xingang, Xie Fang, Liu Xiaoqing, Pan Hong and Jiang Wen.
The seven-day film festival simultaneously screened feature films such as The Kunlun Column (《巍巍崑崙》) and The Baise Uprising (《百色起義》), documentaries such as Unforgettable Days (《難忘的日子》) and some documentaries, and presented 40 films that had been released in the previous two years.
The successful hosting of the first China Film Festival signified that New China's film industry had gradually established an independent and complete film industry system, providing healthy and uplifting entertainment and aesthetic services to audiences numbering in the tens of billions of person-times annually.
At the same time, a large number of artistic talents formed a cinematic art with the national characteristics of the PRC, and enabled Chinese cinema to take steps towards the world stage. The first China Film Festival laid a solid foundation and had a major impact on the vigorous future development of the Chinese film industry.
With the changing times, Chinese cinema has entered a golden age; today, there are as many as five authoritative and professional film festivals across the Strait and in Hong Kong and Macao, and they also have a strong influence internationally.