Zhang recalls that she attended a meeting alongside Shen Teng, Xu Zheng and Wu Jing, all among China's most sought-after stars, at the China Film Administration a few years ago, when she felt quite frustrated and nervous. During a break close to the ending of the meeting, she even started to sob in private.

The conference was about the preparation of My Country, My Parents, an anthology blockbuster and a tribute to China's National Day last year. Gathering the four A-list stars, all later serving as the directors of their stand-alone stories, the movie of four short tales raked in more than 1.48 billion yuan to soar as one of the highest-grossing movies in 2021. The movie also marks Zhang's directorial debut.

As Zhang was entrusted by the administration to helm and star in one of the four stories, the actress realized she was still a novice in the filmmaking sector. Back then, Xu's creation team had conceived a draft plotline when Wu obtained a lot of filmmaking experience from his Wolf Warrior franchise and The Battle at Lake Changjin.

"All of my previous work just needed the individual effort. I chose the scripts that I was interested in. I could live like the role to get an immersive understanding. But the directorial job was quite different, I needed to find a good story at first and then establish a production team," recalls Zhang.

Despite struggling with huge pressure, Zhang, who was born in 1979, conducted research and interviews to delve into the early history of Chinese scientists and engineers dedicated to the development of the first Long March rocket in the late 1960s. Zhang plays a gunpowder carver, a dangerous job that requires the workers to manually adjust the thickness of gunpowder in the early phase of rocket research.

"I believe the opportunities are for those who are well-prepared," says Zhang, adding that the most important element for filmmakers is to maintain a sincere and honest respect to the cinematic art.

Although China has seen a robust recovery amid the sporadic COVID-19 resurgences, most industry insiders believe Chinese filmmakers are still in a tough and difficult time due to the drop in the number of investors and the changing taste of the market.

Fu Ruoqing, chairman of the China Film Group Corp, says most Chinese cinemas have seen a decline in audience numbers and revenues within the last three years, hence the pivotal "mission" for all insiders is to figure out how to reignite audience interest to draw people back to cinemas.

"Such effort not only needs appealing storytelling and artistic creation, but also needs to improve film-screening technology to give audiences a visual feast that they could not get at home," adds Fu.