Serbian film director Emir Kusturica is chairing the jury panel at the ongoing Shanghai International Film Festival.

Kusturica last visited Shanghai in 2012, when he and his band "No Smoking" participated in the West Bund summer music festival, where his performance of Bella Ciao brought the night to its climax.

Bella Ciao has for decades been one of the most popular foreign songs in China, where it is known as Pengyou Zaijian, thanks to it featuring in the 1969 Yugoslav film The Bridge directed by Hajrudin Krvavac.

Yugoslav films, many about the anti-fascist war in the 1940s, were once immensely popular in China.

For example, the 1972 film Walter Defends Sarajevo was a blockbuster viewed by 300 million people all over the world, many of them in China.

The film was first shown in China in 1977. Together with other Yugoslav films, it was very well received because it was one of the few foreign films that was screened in China during that time, and Chinese audiences loved its many action sequences.

"It was like a James Bond film at the time," said Nick Yu Rongjun, playwright and artistic director at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center. Yu adapted the film for the stage last year, and Bosnian theater director Haris Pasovic directed the production.

"We are all proud that this movie has been so popular in China in the past several decades. It is unusual for a movie from a small country to become so popular in a big country such as China," Pasovic said.

Kusturica's film debut in 1981 Do You Remember Dolly Bell? won the award for the best first work at the Venice Film Festival. His second feature film When Father Was Away on Business earned him the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as a nomination for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards.

In 1995 the black comedy Underground won Kusturica his second Palme d'Or.

On Monday, Kusturica said at a news conference at the Shanghai International Film Festival that while film making has changed through the years, as much as the audiences and their aesthetics, he believed films still have to have a philosophical significance.

The box office volume no longer reflects the quality of a film, he said, and he felt sorry that films have become "products". He called on young filmmakers to return to the morality, aesthetics and meaning of film itself.

"Films are more than what you see with your eyes. It still involves lots of idealism, though nowadays idealists are often considered foolish," he said.

More than 500 films are due to be screened at the nine-day Shanghai International Film Festival, which ends on Sunday. The jury, led by Kusturica, will choose the winners of the Golden Goblet Awards from 14 shortlisted films.

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(China Daily 06/17/2016 page3)