NEWPORT BEACH, the United States, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Two Chinese-themed films -- "Go Back to China" and "Baby" -- will be screened at the 20th annual Newport Beach Film Festival (NBFF) held in the coastal city of California this week.
The film "Go Back to China," written and directed by Chinese American filmmaker Emily Ting, chronicles the story of fashionista, Sasha Li, a spoiled rich girl living in the United States and estranged from her family in China, who burns through her trust fund and is forced by her irate father to return to China to work for the family toy business.
Initially pretending compliance in the hopes of suckering her dad into loosening his purse-strings again, it soon becomes a telemachy of self-discovery that enables Sasha to expand her horizons and discover she has a fulfilling knack for toy designing.
The second Chinese film, "Baby," directed by Liu Jie and produced by Shan Gao, premiered recently at China Onscreen Biennial. In the film, Jiang Meng, a lowly cleaner working in a children's hospital vows to save a baby born with the same debilitating congenital defects she was born with, whose father has abandoned it as too expensive to treat.
Running from April 25 to May 2, the Newport Beach Film Festival boasts over 60 narrative films and over 200 shorts in its line-up this year, as well as a wide-ranging documentary program, and a World Cinema Spotlight program which will showcase nine indie features and seven documentary shorts from around the globe, including China, Chile, Ireland, South Korea, Europe, Japan, South America and Australia.
Film fans are invited to attend the Pacific Rim Showcase Party this Wednesday, honoring the best in Chinese, Asian and Australian filmmaking.
NBFF Executive Director, Gregg Schwenk, said of the festival, "We've always focused on diverse, strong filmmaking, and we're most proud of how we've been embraced, not just by our audience, but by the filmmaking community."
Newport Beach, with its pristine beaches and thriving art scene, is a popular vacation destination on the Southern California coast and its proximity to Hollywood enables a lot of distributors, sales agents, and industry buyers for film and TV to attend the festival scouting for talent and pick up deals to fill their distribution pipelines.
"This year, the theme is the Power of Ideas," Schwenk told the Variety, a leading U.S. entertainment media. "And we have an exceptionally strong lineup of features, with a record number of U.S. premieres and filmmakers at the festival."
