The Ecuadorian House of Culture and the Chinese Embassy in Quito are presenting a festival of prize-winning Chinese films, beginning with I Beg You To Praise Me on Wednesday, the House said in a bulletin.

The film, which won director Huang Jiaxin the award for Best Script at the 2005 Shanghai Film Festival, describes a journalist's investigation into a story told to him by a reader.

The bulletin said that prize-winning Chinese directors remain little-known in Latin America, which is saturated by commercial cinemas, adding that the seven films in the festival, which runs until October 21, will be shown in Mandarin with Spanish subtitles.

"China's citizens are attracted by real-life cinema, related to the daily life of common people," said the bulletin. "These directors promote a cinema which shows ways of rethinking and confronting reality, with the alternatives offered by modernization," it added.

On Thursday, Zhang Yimou's film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles and Feng Xiaogang's Cellular Phone will be shown at the festival. China is the world's third-largest film-making nation, said the bulletin.

Zhong Dafeng, director of China's Cinema Academy, said in August that the nation has produced 10,000 films since 1905, filming 350 features in 2006 alone. He estimated there would be 400 films shot in 2007, 100 of which will be using high-definition digital technology.

(Xinhua News Agency October 11, 2007)