Sino Silver Screen: Chinese Filmmaker Named Best Director at Asian Film Awards, and "The Sacrifice" has Huge Opening Weekend

This post comes courtesy of our content partners China Film Insider.

Chinese auteur Wang Xiaoshuai named Best Director at Asian Film Awards 2020

Asian Film Awards 2020 unveiled winners for its 14th edition on Wednesday, Oct 28. South Korean megahit Parasite unsurprisingly won Best Picture, but Chinese auteur Wang Xiaoshuai took home the Best Director Award for So Long, My Son. Meanwhile, Chinese actress Zhou Dongyu received the Best Actress recognition for her extraordinary performance in Hong Kong filmmaker Derek Tsang Kwok-cheung’s Better Days, and Zhou’s screen partner Jackson Lee was named the year’s best newcomer.

War film The Sacrifice raked in RMB 350 million on debut weekend, leading Chinese box office

Chinese war film The Sacrifice had notched up over RMB 300 million in China’s box office by Sunday afternoon, Oct 25, according to the Chinese ticket tracker Maoyan. The movie got off to a strong start during its debut that Friday, raking in over RMB 100 million, and scored a 9.4 out of 10 on Maoyan. Before its release, the movie had already been highly-anticipated as it’s co-directed by three renowned filmmakers: Guan Hu, who directed this year’s top blockbuster The Eight Hundred, Guo Fan, whose 2019 sci-fi film The Wandering Earth made the list of top-grossing movies in the history of the Chinese box office, as well as Lu Yang, known for Chinese martial arts (wuxia) film Brotherhood of Blades.

Following that successful weekend for The Sacrifice, the Chinese film market as a whole saw another busy weekend with the release of Japanese animated film Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna, which grossed RMB 19.05 million during its Friday release, although The Sacrifice did surpass Digimon to continue its dominance in China’s daily box office, generating nearly RMB 50 million on Friday, and bringing its total to more than RMB 568 million. Coming in third on Friday was local film My People, My Homeland which raked in RMB 10.8 million on Friday, with its total box office revenue now topping RMB 2.65 billion. 

iQIYI’s The Bad Kids wins Best Creative and Newcomer Actor awards at Busan Film Festival’s Asia Contents Awards 

Chinese streaming firm iQIYI's summer hit The Bad Kids just took home the Best Creative award at the second Asia Contents Awards. Hosted by Busan International Film Festival, the Asia Contents Awards is an international film and television awards show dedicated to outstanding Asian content from TV, OTT and other diverse platforms that have been released in the past year from 14 Asian countries. The Bad Kids is a suspense drama produced and released by iQIYI. The series has scored a 9.2 out of 10 on China’s most discerning film review website, Douban. It is the first series released in iQIYI's widely acclaimed “Mist Theater,” a content library dedicated to iQIYI’s original suspense dramas. 

READ: Sino Silver Screen: The Holidays May Be Over, but the Cinemas Are Just Getting Started

Images: China Film Insider, iQIYI