By Li Shuang

The international film review site imdb.com is accessible again in China as from Thursday, marking the end of a 29- day block, which started January 7.

The site's listing of two documentaries on Tibet, which are rumored to have caused the block, are accessible, their trailers are available, but user comments are empty.

The Amazon-owned IMDB (Internet Movie Database) and IMDB Pro were found to be blocked across China on January 6. A few days before the block, links of listings on IMDB of the two documentaries on Tibet were frequently tweeted and re-tweeted.

The two documentaries, When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun and The Sun behind the Clouds, were the reason the China Film Group pulled two Chinese films (Lu Chuan's Nanking Nanking and Ye Kai's Quick Quick Slow Slow) out of the 21st Palm Spring International Film Festival before the opening on January 5. The first two films both deal with the topic of Tibet and were shown at the festival, which wrapped up on January 18.

However, during the whole time IMDB was blocked, official websites of both films were accessible.

Unlike other blocked sites in China like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, of which one or two similar services in Chinese are available, there is no similar service to IMDB available in China.

There are a good number of Internet users, mostly film lovers and professionals, who log on to the site regularly. The block left many of them without reliable information; others sought ways to get around it. "We had to use proxies to do our job," said Li Hongyu, film critic of the Chinese version of Timeout magazine, "luckily proxies work just fine."

Observers suspect the block has made the films better known than they would have been. "Now the films are known as 'the cause of the IMDB block' rather than just films," says blogger Arena. An Internet mime of spelling IMDB as "I'M Dead Big-brother" was spotted in many online forums and blogs.

Last Thursday the site was accessible again. "A logical guess would be that the film festival ended," Michael Anti, Harvard Nieman Fellow and an observer of China's cyber space, told the Global Times. Currently all IMDB content is accessible including trailers of both documentaries. There are no user reviews on either films. A few reviews submitted by the Global Times reporters are still being approved.

YouTubecn.com is newly blocked after its debut less than a month ago, with a note on the front page saying "we are blocked. Thanks for your attention."