Work on a new film based on a script by novelist Liu Cixin, the first Asian ever to win a global sci-fi literature's top honor Hugo Award, has just begun.

The movie called Mo Ri Zheng Jiu (The Rescue on the Last Day) will star award-winning Hong Kong actor Nick Cheung Ka-fai and veteran actor Hu Jun, best known for the first Sino-Kazakh coproduction The Composer.

Director Shen Yue says that Liu wrote the script before he started to write The Three-Body Problem, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in August 2015. The book was first published in 2006.

Zhu Jin, the curator of Beijing Planetarium, will be the film's chief science consultant.

The movie is on the slate recently announced by the Beijing-based company Cultural Investment Holdings during the just-concluded 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival.

The lineup consists of 11 feature-length films and three TV series.

Other projects include a crime thriller A Robbery in Moscow; a comedy Coward Hero; a drama Moerdaoga; Hong Kong director Alan Mak Siu-fai's Jian Cha Feng Yun (The Procurators) and the Sino-UK coproduction The Loch Ness Monster.

Filming for A Robbery in Moscow, co-developed by host-turned filmmaker Liu Yiwei and Hong Kong iconic star Andy Lau, and which stars Lau andr Ge You, is scheduled to start next year.

Coward Hero, set in Shanghai in 1930s, and starring actor Yue Yunpeng and actress Tong Liya, centers on a street gangster who accidently becomes a police officer.

The film will be released across the Chinese mainland on July 19.