SIFF World Express | The Legend of Sealed Book to Show at Ireland’s Cork International Film Festival

Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) World Express has set off again, this time carrying a 4K-restored version of the film The Legend of Sealed Book to Ireland. As one of the most significant and popular annual cultural events in Ireland, the 67th Cork International Film Festival will be held from November 10th to 20th, 2022, and the 4K restoration of The Legend of Sealed Book will be shown offline to further Sino-Irish exchange.

Poster of the 4k restoration of The Legend of Sealed Book

The Legend of Sealed Book is an animated feature film adapted from some chapters of Ping Yao Zhuan (The Suppression of the Demons), produced by China's Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1983. It tells the story of a young boy Dansheng fighting three foxes with spirits and overcoming many hardships to regain the heavenly book, learn the spells from it and benefit the common people. The film draws on the essence of mythologies, folklore, painting, opera, and other forms of traditional Chinese arts and the composition, art direction, score and theme showcase distinctive characteristics of Chinese animation.

Title sequence of The Legend of Sealed Book (1983)

The 4K version of The Legend of Sealed Book to be shown at the Cork Film Festival is a restoration of the 1983 film version using digital technology. In the subsequent 4K restoration after a long process of physical and digital restoration, the team followed the principles of "restoring the subject to its vintage state" and "retaining its original features" in denoising, removing scratches, color enhancement, image super resolution and other treatment. After continuous testing and repeated tuning, the brushstrokes and noises of the original animation are retained as far as possible while improving the resolution of the film.

Cork International Film Festival is Ireland's first and largest film festival running annually in November. International award-winning films, new art films and cinema classics are screened both in venues and online and selected for various awards. Through the Festival Digital Platform, it has been made available to viewers nationwide and become very popular in recent years.

As the only international A-category film festival in China, Shanghai International Film Festival continues to give full play to its role as an international platform in giving even greater support to excellent Chinese-language films. Since 2015 when SIFF World Express was officially launched, it has been carefully selecting outstanding works in the competition and screening units, and regularly sending them to major international film festivals to promote the overseas distribution of Chinese films. At the same time, it helps potential projects shortlisted for SIFF Project with entering the international film market, further promoting their co-production negotiations and overseas pre-sale, so that more outstanding Chinese-language films can "go global” to tell Chinese stories and make our voices heard.