Notre-Dame on Fire (Notre-Dame Brule), a blockbuster directed by French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud based on the devastating fire at the iconic Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral in 2019, premiered in Beijing on Thursday.

French Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak, Annaud and several Chinese organizers and renowned artists were at the premiere event.

On April 15, 2019, a huge fire engulfed Notre-Dame de Paris, a centuries old medieval Catholic cathedral in the heart of the French capital, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Annaud's film follows the hours between the fire breaking out and firefighters fully extinguishing the flames some 15 hours later in a multi-points of view narrative with a natural roving lens style.

Annaud said he presented the film as a tribute to the 400 firefighters mobilized to tackle the blaze.

"At that time, nobody knew what had happened inside the cathedral. I learned all my materials and stories by talking to the firefighters who were there. So I have a lot of respect and gratitude for them," said Annaud.

"When I saw the movie I could feel that the movie was terribly difficult to shoot and to make in post production," said Wuershan, a Chinese film director.

Wuershan said that he really likes the film's balance between the sense of reality and a sense of drama.

Annaud recalled the laborious shooting process, stressing that he immersed the actors playing firefighters in real flames, after taking appropriate security measures, to recapture the real events to the greatest extent.

"Some scenes were difficult because the actors could only stay there for about a minute, otherwise they would be starved of oxygen and their lives would be in danger. I took that into consideration and was ready to get them out immediately," Annaud said.

Feng Shaofeng, who starred in Wolf Totem, a 2015 drama film also directed by Annaud, said that live filming without special effects are the director's signature.

"The harder it is to make a movie, the more the director (Annaud) seems to like it, just like when we were filming Wolf Totem. It's no surprise that the director choose to shoot live-action because when we were filming wolves, we didn't use any special effects," said Feng.

French President Emmanuel Macron publicly announced that the cathedral would be rebuilt in five years, in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. He promised to build it back more beautifully, using advancements in technology.