Cheung to Grace New China Film Festival

She is one of the biggest names in world cinema and she’s coming to Edinburgh as part of a newly-launched, hugely ambitious film festival.

Maggie Cheung is to give an acting masterclass as part of a festival dedicated to Chinese cinema.

Beginning on the ninth of next month, Cinema China is being presented by the University of Edinburgh and includes world and UK premieres, plus an online education programme for school pupils, and the commissioning of a special film score. Some of the movies on the programme are unlikely to be publicly screened in UK again for another generation.

The festival, which also takes in cinemas in Glasgow, Stirling, Dundee, Ullapool and Tobermory, plus sixteen venues in England, Ireland and Wales too, is the brainchild of filmmaker and film historian, Mark Cousins, and Dorota Ostrowska, from Edinburgh University.

A series of lectures taking place at the university – on topics such as Chinese cinema during the 1930s and gender issues in modern Chinese cinema – will run in parallel with the festival, which lasts nine days. Many of the 26 films in the programme required the extensive help of the Beijing Film Academy to be released for screening in the UK.

One of the premiere highlights is Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. The new