The World (film) France's Lumen Films. It received additional financial support from the Shanghai Film Studio and several Japanese corporations including Bandai Visual and Tokyo FM, among others. The film premiered in competition at the 2004 Venice Film Festival on September 4, 2004, but failed to win the coveted Golden Lion, the festival's top award, which ultimately went to Mike Leigh's drama "Vera Drake", but which Jia would win two years later with "Still Life". "The World" also premiered in 2004 at the New York Film Festival and would go on to receive a limited release in New York City the following year
Songs of Life Festival by Bulgaria. When trains came to take 49,000 more Bulgarian Jews to the death camps, the Bulgarian people resisted the demands of the German government and refused to allow their Jewish neighbors to be sent to concentration camps in what was the single largest non-deportation of Jews during World War II. The Songs of Life Festival debuted in November 2008 on the 65th anniversary of the rescue in the Bulgarian cities of Sofia and Plovdiv and in Petah Tikva and Jerusalem in Israel. Ernest Bloch’s choral-orchestral piece, "Sacred Service", a Jewish work, was performed. During the inaugural festival, 49,000 flowers