The top of the new Chinese Film Museum building will be sealed by the end of 2004, according to an official from Beijing's Key Projects Construction Committee. The world's largest film museum will be completed in December of 2005 at which time audiences will be able to experience the visual shock of the 19-meter-high gigantic screen in the museum cinema.

The China Film Museum is located in the railway testing site of Nangao County in Chaoyang District, covering an area of 52 mu and a floor area of 37,900 square meters. Its 31-meter-high main building is painted dark green and has five floors, including a basement. Its shape of an enormous black box symbolizes the black world in which a film's processing and presentation is done.

This professional film museum is the largest of its kind in the world, with sections on film exhibition, film exposition and film presentation. Museum visitors can learn about the growth of the Chinese film industry over the past century, since its birth in 1905. In the cinema, equipped with a 19-meter-high screen, the audience can watch movies, with special optical glasses, as if they are on the set themselves. The cinema will also include supplementary facilities of exhibition storage, market research, administration, and integrated services.

"Our purpose is to build the world's first-class film museum with distinctive cultural value and national characteristics. Meanwhile, it will be a landmark cultural facility in the capital. Its complicated space structure highlights its functions of exposing film art, educating film culture and communicating film meaning. It is a complex for cultural display, communication and research."

Moreover, the museum has adopted advanced designs and latest technologies according to each section's requirement, boasting sophisticated systems of power supply, lighting, communication, ventilation, fire fighting, security, and intelligent control.

(Chinanews.cn December 29, 2004)