Nanchang cinema complex's award-winning design is inspired by books

Even in the era of the e-reader, you still open a book to find black print on a white background. Films, by contrast, are usually in colour. But at Nanchang Insun International Cinema, in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, these lines are blurred.

Hong Kong design firm One Plus Partnership takes cinema-goers through a library and into the actual pages of a book in their design for a film venue.

The project, completed in July 2013, has already won an impressive 24 international and Hong Kong design awards, and was a finalist in the Golden Pin Design Award 2014, which celebrates products created for the Chinese-speaking market.

It's not the first cinema complex designed by One Plus, which was established in 2004 by married partners Ajax Law Ling-kit and Virginia Lung. But it is probably their most ambitious. (The couple has also designed the Times Square cinemas in Causeway Bay, and cinemas at Tsim Sha Tsui shopping mall The One.)

"We have a theme for each project," Lung says, noting the firm's ethos of "original, theme-driven design". To get to this cinema you walk through a bookshop, so a narrative involving both emerged.

"In words and pictures, though different media, books and films strive towards the same goal - to inspire and ignite our imagination," Lung says. "Yet they are entwined. To make a remarkable film, the creative work of the scriptwriter plays an important part."