(Photo: China Daily)

By the end of the summer, the total movie ticket sales on the Chinese mainland have reached 17.6 billion yuan ($2.45 billion), a record high. The tireless efforts of the entire film industry have made this possible, writes China Daily's Zhang Zhouxiang:

Since students on summer vacation account for a major percentage of the audience, summer has always been a key time for the film industry. Summer is also the time when the film industry can influence young minds with positive messages.

The movie that played the most important role in helping the film industry record its highest ticket sales is Ne Zha, a purely Chinese fantasy film which registered 4.6 billion yuan in ticket sales－about three times that of the second-highest grossing film The Wandering Earth.

Chinese filmmakers have succeeded in drawing youngsters to the movies, a development that could bear fruits for decades to come. A generation that grows up enjoying the country's cultural products will have confidence in its own culture.

The efforts filmmakers have made in providing audiences with high-quality productions are beyond many people's imagination. For example, Ne Zha was edited 66 times, with 1,600 professionals and technicians on the job. The 110-minute-long film has about 5,000 initial scenes, of which more than 2,000 were "remade" at the post-production stage. To quote its director Yang Yu, the whole team went almost "mad" during the editing of the film.

Born in 2000, a documentary film that records the lives of two Chinese youths who grow up in China, receive higher education in the United States and are full of patriotic spirit took 12 years to make. The filming started in 2006 and continued till 2018.

The Bravest, a film which tells the stories of firefighters who even sacrifice their lives to save others, highlights all the details of the true stories it is based on. In order to bring authenticity to a firefighting scene, the filmmakers built the oil tanks on a 1:1 scale and relied less on special effects.

The filmmakers' efforts embody the spirit of craftsmanship. Which will give the film industry enough confidence to draw the younger generation to the movies with quality and meaningful films, and thus promote China's soft power.