It has been 18 years since a Chinese-language film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Picture. Nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards were announced on March 15, and Better Days, representing Hong Kong, China, was nominated for "Best International Film". Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou, was nominated in 2003.

"Although it is still unclear whether the film will win the award, the nomination shows that the level of Chinese film production has improved in recent years."

Directed by Zeng Guoxiang and starring Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee, Better Days is adapted from the novel Young Man of You, So Beautiful, serialized on Jinjiang Literature Network. It tells the story of how two young men protect each other on the eve of the college entrance examination when a campus accident changes their fate. The film received good reviews after its release in 2019, with a Douban rating of 8.3 and a box office of 1.56 billion yuan. It won eight awards at the 39th Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Director. It was also listed in the New Generation Section of the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. In November 2020, Better Days was nominated for the Best Feature Film at the 33rd Golden Rooster Awards.

For more than ten years, the environment of domestic film creation has been changing constantly, and the film market has been accumulating steadily, especially in recent years, excellent works have been emerging constantly. In the Chinese New Year season just passed, domestic films got off to a good start. The domestic film market recovered quickly and broke the ceiling of the market. The market showed amazing vitality. China's total box office in the first two months of this year exceeded 15 billion yuan, with domestic films "Hi, Mom" and "Detective Chinatown 3" ranking first and second, leading the global film industry, according to Dengta Data.

Source: China Intellectual Property News      Date: March 21, 2021