Story-telling is the biggest issue

Then, what are the reasons that make the "audience-driven" US distribution companies think Chinese films are not marketable?

Foreign-language films rarely find more than a niche audience in the United States. Their tastes and cultural preferences obviously are barring them from watching Chinese-language films.

"Red Cliff" ended in a fiasco with only $627,047 on the US market. But in Japan, the film quickly became a phenomenon when it opened in 2008 and was one of the hottest movies that year.

Besides hot actors in the movie, Japanese viewers' knowledge of the Chinese novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," which the movie was adapted in part from, served well.

It was the same case in France for "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame." The kungfu movie, directed by Tsui Hark, did fairly well when it opened in the European country in April. It ranked the ninth in the French box office back then, an excellent performance for a foreign film.

Experts say that the success of the movie was due to the French people's familiarity with the main character, Detective Dee, who had been made famous in Western countries by late Dutch diplomat and writer Robert Van Gulik.

Van Gulik translated "Dee Goong An (Stories of Detective Dee)," an 18th-century Chinese detective novel, into English and used it as the basis for his own series of detective novels about Judge Dee.

Besides the preference of the US audience to local films, Chinese films have their own problems.

Technology has always been an integral part of filmmaking. But lack of professionals in filmmaking has plagued the Chinese industry for years.

Feng, director of "Aftershock," said that when he shot the earthquake drama, numerous disaster scenes had to be processed abroad.

Although there was an imported apparatus with more than 5,000 functions of audio and visual effects, the machine could not play its due role "because technicians can only use perhaps 500 of them," Feng said.

Meanwhile, although there are a small group of actors, directors and producers at the top of the movie industry who are extraordinarily successful, talent among screenwriters and directors has not been actively cultivated.

"Money is not the problem. The film industry is desperate for creative talent," said Wang Zhongjun, chairman of Huayi Brothers Media Group, China's first listed private film company.

Three years ago, when "Kung Fu Panda" broke the Chinese box office record for highest-grossing animated features with 180 million yuan ($26 million), many questioned why the DreamWorks film had not been made by a Chinese company, as it borrowed heavily from Chinese culture.

For years, local moviegoers have been complaining why Chinese animations could not be as funny and palatable as their Hollywood counterparts.

"Dinosaur Baby," a local animation screened in April and May, lost out to Fox's "Rio." When "Legend of a Rabbit" was released last month, many questioned the originality of the movie, saying it was just an imitation of "Kung Fu Panda" and even the posters were alike.

The US audience's preference to domestically produced movies and China's lag in filmmaking technology are certainly obstacles, but insiders say that story-telling seems to be the biggest problem that fails Chinese films in both domestic and foreign markets.

Mark Osborne, one of the directors of "Kung Fu Panda," once said that if Chinese animation filmmakers want to learn something from Hollywood, they should learn "how to tell an interesting story."

Hollywood's story-telling methods are not unique to the United States but are universal ways to attract human souls, he said.

Yin Hong, a professor of film and television studies with Beijing-based Tsinghua University, said that Chinese films have not yet found a cultural and artistic strategy for telling a Chinese story with a global perspective and for expressing universal cultural values through film language.

"The American society is such a multi-racial, multi-cultural culture that they have been able to make movies for the lowest common denominator," Chris D. Nebe, an acclaimed Hollywood writer, producer and director, told Xinhua in Los Angeles. "That's why everybody understands them and likes them."