Dressing the Screen, a Sino-British fashion film festival, opened at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing Oct 26.

The Sino-British Film Festival is a flagship program under UK NOW, which is the biggest festival of the British arts and creative industries in China. The exhibition showed the origins and developments of fashion films in Britain; it also demonstrated a potential way of expressing arts to the Chinese fashion industry for its further exploration in fashion films. The purpose of fashion film is to show fashion through the compact combination of fashion designs and multimedia arts.

The film festival was divided into two major sections of British and Chinese fashion films. More than 50 Chinese and British designers, brands or fashion filmmakers presented and watched more than 100 films. The duration of the films lasted between dozens of seconds to around 10 minutes, ranging from early documentaries of fashion making in 1938 to the latest works of 2012. The brands varied from British classics to rapidly rising Chinese designs. The festival featured videos of early fashion design manuscripts and recent holographic images. It was Asia’s most comprehensive review of fashion films to date.

Joanna Burke, minister of the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy, Shao Zhong, chairman of the board of Modern Media Co Ltd, and Wen Haofeng, senior vice-president of operations for Swarovski Elements' North Asian division, made a toast during the opening ceremony of this unprecedented film festival. The festival planners, Kathryn Ferguson and Shaway Yeh, as well as many other fashion filmmakers from China and Britain also attended the opening party.

Video: Yu Chenkang

Voiceover: Chris Clark

Producer: Flora Yue