Peking University, Aug. 1, 2015: Pure Hearts: into Chinese Showbiz, a film directed by Bi Zhifei and co-produced by Research Center for Film and Television Drama, Peking University, short-listed the main competition in the 23rd San Francisco International Film Festival.
It is known that only 15 films succeed to be selected for the main feature film competition among over 3000 participants from USA, China, UK, France and other countries, within which two Chinese films are included. One is Pure Hearts and the other is N+N, directed by Lai Yan-Chi from Hong Kong. The film festival is going to be held from Aug. 7 to Aug. 16 for 10 days. Then many international stars will participate, including Jackie Chan, Jane Fonda and Sharon Stone.
San Francisco International Film Festival was set up in 1992. It is aimed at finding, supporting and encouraging independent filmmakers and artists from America and all around the world and helping them gain publicrecognition. Various types of films can take part in this festival, involving stories, documentaries, shorts and animated movies.
Bi Zhifei, the director of Pure Hearts, graduated with a Master’s degree from the Beijing Film Academy in 2005 and gained a doctor’s degree in Film and Television Studies from School of Arts, Peking University in 2011.
Pure Hearts is Bi Zhifei’s maiden full-length film. It is produced by Beijing Shichuanchuang Culture&Media Co Ltd, co-produced by Research Center for Film and Television Drama, Peking University and supervised by Chen Xuguang. This film makes a big breakthrough in national youth movies. Different from the others, Pure Hearts focuses on a special group of young people, good-looking students from department of performance and tells how they interact with the society. Their kindness and pure hearts stand in total contrast to the hidden rules and undesirable phenomena in showbiz.
Pure Hearts is expected to be perfect in all aspects. It takes Bi 10 years to complete this film. 18 leading roles are selected from college students in 8 main art colleges in China. Bi Zhifei hopes to convey such an idea “making movies with sincerity and internationalizing them with best quality” by choosing new people and letting them play themselves. Except the choice on leading roles, all the production have achieved the level of blockbuster movies. Image-editing lasted 10 months as well as sound-production 6 months. Now, the film is in the progress of post-production on visual effects, sound and music. It is scheduled for release in the latter half of the year.
Whether Pure Hearts can show new styles of Chinese new directors? Whether it can convey the scrupulous attitude to viewers? Whether it can achieve great distinction? Let us wait and see.
Written by: Fu Guirong
Edited by: Choisum Kwok & Zhang Jiang
