A film revisiting the birth of the People's Republic of China will feature rare color footage of the founding ceremony held in Tian'anmen Square on Oct 1, 1949.
The movie, Mao Zedong 1949, will hit domestic theaters on Sept 20.
The cast comprises five veteran actors best known for playing political leaders in movies and TV dramas. And among them are actors Tang Guoqiang and Liu Jin, respectively playing Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou En'lai.
A highlight: the founding ceremony sequences near the end of the film is restored color footage that the crew purchased from Russia, says executive producer and director Huang Jianxin in a recent interview.
The ceremony where Chairman Mao officially announced the founding of the People's Republic China to the world had 300,000 people in Tian'anmen Square.
A number of films and TV dramas as well as documentaries feature the historic moment, but all of them are in black and white, as this is the only such remaining old footage in China.
Speaking about how he laid his hands on the footage, Huang says he happened to hear that a person has watched the color clip on his smartphone, so he assigned two teams to go to Russia to find the four-minute footage that was shot by former Soviet Union photographers. The footage was restored by a Chinese company, which transformed it into 4K ultra high-definition version.
Featuring an all-star cast including blockbuster action hero Wu Jing and veteran actress Zhang Ziyi, the film tells how the China Everest Climbing Commando achieved the first historic ascent of Mount Quomolangma, known as Mount Everest in the West, by conquering the North Ridge in May 1960.
The film, a cinematic rendition of one of the most dramatic emergency landings in Chinese aviation history in Southwest China's Sichuan province in May 2018, ranks as the second-most anticipated film of the month on Maoyan.
Helmed by veteran director Chen Kaige and supported by six other famed directors, the seven-part anthology focuses on national memories and presents Chinese people's stories that took place during seven monumental moments in the past seventy years.