A photo posted online by a lawyer has become widespread. It shows members of the overflow audience sitting in a movie theater's corridor to watch the recently-released patriotic movie, My Country and My People, because they could not get seats.

Moviegoers who couldn't get seats sit in the side aisles to watch the film. (Photo: Sina Weibo)

Ticket sales for the movie, which was released on Sept 30, echo that photo, exceeding 1.1 billion yuan within four days. Besides that, its expert rating on douban.com, China's equivalent to imdb.com, reached 8.1. Its public rating on microblog, China's equivalent to Twitter, even reached as high as 9.4.

To quote a popular comment, My Country and My People is a rare product that both survives the critical viewpoints of experts and meets the spiritual need of the public.

The key to the movie's success lies in telling stories of the everyday people who had experienced great historical events, instead of showing audiences a grand picture of the events. For example, one of those people is Lin Zhiyuan, an engineer in charge of the engineering preparations at Tian'anmen Square for the ceremony to mark the founding of the People's Republic of China. The difficulty he faced was how to make a steel rod for the national flag.

That difficulty might seem odd today, but at that time, it was really hard to find a 35-meter-long steel rod suitable for raising the flag because of war-torn old China's limited industrial capacity. Lin made it at last by welding four tap water pipes together to make a 22.5-meter-long one.

The story about the water pipes has attracted hundreds of discussions on the microblog, which proves it is interesting and appealing to audiences. Through that process, the limited industrial capacity of old China was known to all. It proves a much more effective way to spread knowledge about history than telling people "old China lagged behind in industrial capacity".

Lin is only one of the seven everyday figures; the others include a technician who received an confidential order to participate in research on the nuclear bomb, members of China's national female volleyball team, and the police and diplomats who participated in Hong Kong's return to China and so on.

Their successes once again prove that to tell stories about ordinary people is always better than big, empty talk.

For a long time, it has always been a question on how to prevent patriotic films from falling into tiring sermons, and My Country and My People has solved it.

Two other two newly-released patriotic films, namely The Chinese Pilot and The Mountain Climbers, have both followed this new style by putting big events into the stories of ordinary people, and telling them in a realistic narratives. That should be the coming trend of all patriotic works and one can expect patriotic publicity in China to prosper.