Changchun Film Studio went from puppet-state propaganda to the beating heart of Chinese film
In 2011, author Qi Zhai wrote in The World of Chinese about how when she grew up in the 1990s in the Philippines, she and her family rarely went out for leisure except to watch American movies at the mall. But once, a Chinese war film came on TV. “Dad dropped the Newsweek he was reading. Mom came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. They sat down in front of the TV and barely blinked as black-and-white images from Battle of Triangle Hill flashed,” she wrote.
Premiering in 1956, Battle of Triangle Hill, also known as Battle on Shanggan Mountain or Shangganling, was the movie that put the Changchun Film Studio (CFS) on the map of Chinese cinema. The studio was only officially founded a year earlier, in 1955, when the Ministry of Culture completed the merger of the Northeast Film Studio (NFS) and the Yan’an Film Studio, and named the new entity after the city that already served as its home base—Changchun, the cradle of filmmaking in China since the 1940s.
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