Beijing Film Academy

Beijing Film Academy is a higher art school with a long history of film and a profound film culture. The school was formerly the Institute of Performing Arts founded in 1950. In 1951, it moved to the Film School of the Film Bureau of the Central Ministry of Culture, and was renamed Beijing Film School in 1953. In 1956, it was changed to the four-year undergraduate Beijing Film Academy. Over the past 70 years since its establishment, it has attracted many famous teachers and inherited many schools of thought. It has created many classic works in the history of Chinese film and has led the development direction of Chinese film education in terms of discipline construction, teaching creation, teacher training, and talent selection.

The school adheres to the school motto of "Respecting teachers and passing on the torch", the school spirit of "cultivating oneself, studying hard, refining art, and practicing", and the school spirit of "establishing morality, establishing words, establishing actions, seeking truth, seeking beauty, and seeking innovation". It adheres to the school-running characteristics of red charm, professional style, contemporary style, national style, and international style, and the art education of "learning from the people, serving the people, and being artists of the people". It cultivates artistic talents with a reasonable knowledge structure, solid professional ability, rich artistic innovation spirit, and deep humanistic literacy, artistic literacy, scientific literacy and professional literacy, which meet the needs of the development of socialist cultural undertakings. The school has always insisted on selecting and cultivating elite talents, strengthening the position of teaching center, taking the connotative development path, and establishing a complete film education and teaching system. It has formed a school-running pattern of "trinity" of teaching, scientific research, and creation, with education and teaching as the main body, scientific research as the basis, and artistic creation as the support, to support talent training, scientific research, artistic creation and social services.

The school currently has 16 departments and colleges, including the Department of Literature, the Department of Directing, the Department of Photography, the Department of Film Studies, the Department of Film and Television Technology, the School of Performance, the School of Sound, the School of Fine Arts, the School of Animation, the School of Management, the School of Photography, the School of Digital Media, the School of Audiovisual Media, the School of International Exchange, the College of Vocational Education and the School of Continuing Education, the Chinese Film Culture Research Institute, as well as the Graduate School, the Department of Humanities and the Department of Ideological and Political Studies. It covers every aspect of film creation and all aspects of film creation. It is the only institution that can independently create feature films and animated films. The Youth Film Studio is both an organizing and guiding unit for students' film creation practice and a production unit for teachers' artistic innovation practice. It has produced a large number of excellent films and student graduation works.

The school takes the first-level discipline of drama and film studies as the core of discipline construction, builds a domestic leading and world-class film study discipline system, and plays an important role in leading professional construction and talent training. With the two first-level disciplines of fine arts and art theory under the category of art, it complements and advances with the discipline of film studies, and appropriately develops disciplines that intersect with other disciplines such as social sciences and engineering technology. Focus on giving full play to the advantages of disciplines and majors, closely focus on the functional positioning of Beijing's "four centers", especially the cultural center and international exchange center, and serve the construction of a strong film country and the great development and prosperity of culture. Facing the forefront of world film development, we will deepen the internationalization strategy and carry out all-round, multi-level and wide-ranging international education exchanges and cooperation.

As of September 2021, the school has 4,139 students, including 2,332 undergraduates. There are a total of 599 faculty and staff in the school (including 373 full-time teachers), and 103 teachers are rehired from outside. The school has a faculty team with firm political beliefs, noble professional ethics, superb business, good at teaching, and diligent in educating people. There are currently more than 100 talents selected for the national "Thousand Talents Plan" and "Ten Thousand Talents Plan", national candidates for the Hundred Thousand Talents Project, "Four Ones" talents of the Central Propaganda Department and Beijing, "High Innovation Plan" leaders, national and capital labor medal winners, experts enjoying special allowances from the State Council, national outstanding teachers, Beijing outstanding teachers, teaching masters, pioneers of teacher ethics, Great Wall scholars, etc. In addition, many professors of the school serve as chairmen and judges at important film (television) festivals at home and abroad, and there are many teachers who hold academic positions above the director level in domestic professional academic groups.

The school has good conditions for running schools. Professional classrooms and professional laboratories are fully functional and equipped with advanced equipment, and multimedia audio-visual equipment is fully covered. It has several provincial and ministerial key laboratories and experimental teaching demonstration centers, such as the Digital Film Technology and Art Laboratory, the Animation New Media Technology Laboratory, the Digital Film and Television Animation Creation Engineering Research Center, and the Sound Creation and Engineering Center. The school has facilities such as screening rooms, theaters, lecture halls, and studios. The total value of teaching equipment configuration is high, with an average value of about 152,800 yuan per student, which can better meet the needs of teaching, scientific research, and artistic creation of teachers and students. The 24-hour library collection focuses on film and art, and has rich collection resources. The Jimenqiao campus of the school covers an area of ​​105 acres, and the Huairou campus covers an area of ​​667 acres (officially opened in 2021, the first batch of colleges and departments moved in, with a total of about 1,400 teachers and students). The school fully taps the resources of the Huairou and Haidian campuses, continuously improves the efficiency of resource use through integration and optimization, and strives to create a "smart and beautiful campus" to provide a better learning and creative environment for teachers and students.

The school has been approved as a "National Film Think Tank", "Future Image High-end Innovation Center", "China Literary and Art Criticism Base", "Beijing Film Academy Base of the Beijing Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics Research Center", "National Animation Teaching and Research Base" and "Beijing Film and Television Art Research Base". "Journal of Beijing Film Academy" is a source journal of the Chinese Social Science Citation Index Core Journal (CSSCI), a core journal of the Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences Journal A, and a selected journal of the Peking University Core Journal. In the past three years, the school has successively won two major projects in the National Social Science Fund Art Science and the only national key research and development project for the film industry during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period of the Ministry of Science and Technology (key technology research and development and system integration of virtual pre-performance of film and television production). The school has brought together 102 domestic and foreign research teams, including 5 academicians at home and abroad and 2 Yangtze River Scholars. In recent years, 5 papers have been selected for the world's top conference in the field of computer graphics, images and interactive technology (SIGGRAPH Conference), achieving excellent results comparable to Tsinghua University and Peking University, and realizing the "zero breakthrough" and "leapfrog improvement" of film technology research on the international top academic stage.

Beijing Film Academy has always been striving to explore the socialist film education path with Chinese characteristics in practice, and put forward the strategic goal of "building a world-class film school". Always rooted in China, as the only independent higher education institution with film professional education in China, it continues to be the leader of more than 1,000 universities in the country that offer film and television education; always taking the cultivation of Chinese film talents as its own responsibility, it is known as the "cradle of Chinese film talents"; always standing at the forefront of world film education, it is the world's largest and most comprehensive film professional school, and has been selected as the third in the global film and television school rankings for many consecutive years. The school is a governing unit of the International Federation of Film and Television Schools (CILECT), and the school representative serves as the vice chairman of the Asia-Pacific Executive Committee.

In the more than 70 years since its establishment, the school has cultivated tens of thousands of excellent film production, film theory research, film digital technology, cultural management and related professionals for the Chinese film industry, and has had an important impact on film education at home and abroad. Among the artistic talents cultivated are Chen Qiang, Xie Tian, ​​Pang Xueqin, Yu Yang, Wu Yigong, Xie Fei, Zheng Dongtian, Li Qiankuan, Guo Baochang and Zhai Junjie, the older generation of artists; there are also Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Li Shaohong, Tang Guoqiang, Song Chunli, Zhang Tielin, Zhang Fengyi, Wang Zhiwen, Xu Qing, Jiang Wenli, Huang Lei, Lu Chuan, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, Guan Hu, Xu Jinglei, Ning Hao, Chen Kun, Huang Bo and other young and middle-aged film representatives; there are also Zhou Dongyu, Guan Xiaotong, Wang Junkai, Wu Lei, Zhang Zifeng and other large number of new film talents. Teachers, students and alumni have launched a large number of masterpieces with profound ideas, exquisite art and excellent production in every era, such as "Dr. Bethune", "Liu Sanjie" and "Havoc in Heaven" in the 1960s; "Sakura", "Little Flower" and "Nezha Conquers the Dragon King" in the 1970s; "Red Sorghum" and "Camel Xiangzi" in the 1980s; "Founding Ceremony", "Farewell My Concubine", "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Sunny Days" in the 1990s; "Kekexili", "Crazy Stone", "Let the Bullets Fly", "Old Cannon", "Dying to Survive", "Operation Red Sea" and "The Wandering Earth" after 2000, all of which were created by alumni of the school. In the award-winning works of the "Huabiao Award", "Golden Rooster Award" and "Five One Project Award", the proportion of school graduates to winners is as high as 80%. Most of the main creators of Chinese films that won awards at major A-level international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin International Film Festival are alumni of Beijing Film Academy. The school's graduates are also the most important source of film and television teachers in more than a thousand colleges and universities that offer film and television related majors in the country, and most of them have become discipline leaders and backbone teachers.

For many years, the school has actively served the national strategy and various major events in Beijing. It successfully completed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the National Day anniversary celebrations. It has hosted the awards of the "Beijing International Film Festival" for five consecutive years, supported the "Belt and Road" initiative, hosted the awards of two Silk Road International Film Festivals, hosted the 2018 "Light and Shadow Future Xiong'an New Area First Film Week" event, and the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea Beijing Eight-Minute Program Preview Technology Research and Development Work, 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics Image Promotion Animation Design, 2019 Beijing World Horticultural Exposition Opening Ceremony Creative Design and Preview and other major projects. The school mobilized hundreds of teachers and students, especially undergraduates, to go deep into the forefront of large-scale film and television cultural activities in the country and Beijing. Relying on the professional level and academic ability of teachers and students, it showed the world the high-end level of the school in film creation, talent training, academic research, international exchanges, etc.

In the new era, the school has deeply understood the spirit of the National Education Conference and the Beijing Education Conference, and has carefully considered how to strive to build "Double First-Class", clarify the future development direction, how to better carry the lofty mission of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and how to better serve the construction of a socialist film power. Beijing Film Academy will surely create new achievements in education and teaching with a higher realm and a broader vision, create new classics of film works, explore new areas of art education, cultivate outstanding film talents for socialist construction in the new era, and climb to new heights of higher film education in China and the world.