Poster of 10th Beijing International Film Festival Photo: Screenshot of Sina Weibo

The upcoming 10th Beijing International Film Festival (BIFF), which is scheduled to be held in Beijing from Saturday to August 29, has ignited the enthusiasm of Chinese moviegoers. Anticipation is so high that 72 percent of the tickets for the films that will be screened during the festival were sold within the first 10 minutes of them going on sale on Chinese ticketing platform Taopiaopiao on Wednesday. 

Tickets for certain films, including War and Peace, Cinema Paradiso, Akira, and The Matrix trilogy, sold out within seconds. 

The quick sales reflect the ardent anticipation movie fans have for the festival. 

The hashtag for the Beijing International Festival had gained 2.1 billion views on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo as of Thursday. 

Many Chinese moviegoers expressed their excitement for the upcoming film feast while others complained that they were not able to book tickets for the films they wanted to watch.

Xu Lu, a 25-year-old white collar worker living in Beijing, told the Global Times that she and two of her colleagues had planned to purchase tickets to Memories of Murder once the platform began sales at 12 noon on Wednesday, but all three failed to buy a single ticket since the ones they wanted sold out in a second.

"It's just crazy! I never expected that everyone's enthusiasm for watching movies is so high," said Xu.

"It seems that everyone wants to find a way to entertain themselves after suffering during the virus crisis," one Chinese netizen wrote on Sina Weibo.

According to the official Sina Weibo account of BIFF, famous director Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou will attend the festival.

However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all foreign guests such as Austrian film director and screenwriter Jessica Hausner, US film producer Sid Ganis and Australian director Herman van Eyken, will "attend" the festival online. No Indian guests are included on the guest list.

In 2019, the 9th Beijing Film International Festival held the China-India Film Co-production Dialogue, which was attended by Indian actors Shah Rukh Khan and Kabir Khan.