The annual Beijing University Students' Film Festival will be opend on April 20. A movie made by a university greenhand has been selected for the opening ceremony show, eastday.com reported today.

As the first and only film festival in China that was originated, established and organized all by the university students, Beijing University Students' Film Festival has been held for eight consecutive years. This year's is the ninth.

It invites all the movies, produced in the past year(for example, this year's selection will only be those produced in 2001), to its selection list.

The 30 selections will be screened in more than 20 universities in Beijing. The final prize winning movies are appraised and selected all by university students.

Up to now, the selection list includes 22 movies, still eight vacancies left.

Searching for the Gun, a newly produced movie directed by a graduate student who is still studying in the Beijing Film Academy, has been selected for screening at the opening ceremony on April 20. It will also be this film's premiere. The movie was so excellent that Columbia Pictures has decided to buy up its foreign copyright and the Cannes Film Festival has also chosen it as selecion film.

To stand out from the previous eight year's celebrations, the organizers of this year's film festival invited one more university outside Beijing as its guest festival sites. The guest university, Xiamen University lies in south China's Fujian Province.

Its chief festival sites are still in the Tsinghua University and the Beijing Normal University.

( eastday.com April 8, 2002)