Watch Today's Festival: Best CHINA Short Film Festival
Land of Symbiosis, 15min., China
Directed by Wenqing Zhou
Set against the vast grasslands of Karakorum in Xinjiang, the film documents the life of Kazakh herder Shahmuguli Baijiuma and her son Yelibaojun Jieensiali, who stand at the crossroads of tradition and modernity. Their nomadic lifestyle, once defined by following water and pasture, has gradually been replaced by settled brick-house living.
WHAT DATE IS TODAY, 12min., China
Directed by Ricky Zhang
A retired worker who once betrayed his lover during the era of “conduct rectification” returns to an abandoned factory, where he encounters the apparition of Li Fenglin—the gay partner who died because of him—and is forced to confront a lifetime of fear, guilt, and unspoken desire.
Never the more,Never the less, 8min., China
Directed by Nanzhao Wang
Newcomer director Zhou Yi is forced to reunite with his first love Yu Yang, whom he hasn't seen for many years, in order to buy the guitar song he wrote for his first love and create a movie soundtrack.
https://www.instagram.com/nanzhaowang
FIRST SNOW, 13min., China
Directed by Jingjie Shen
One girl broke down over her grades, the other wept over a failed romance. In this snowless winter, two girls created a snowfall that was uniquely theirs.
FOCUS, 3min., China
Directed by Shi Shen
Focus or defocus, when you look at her, she is also looking at you. Falling from the exquisite magazine cover, we enter the electronic wasteland of *FOCUS*. This is a Möbius strip about fiction and reality: we search for focus, yet lose focus in the torrent of images; we think we are bystanders, but ultimately become the prey being gazed upon.
THE CYCLICAL TIME, 21min., China
Directed by Yifan Li
In 3022, historian A’s lover vanishes, leaving only a 2022 photograph. Using the Nuwa System—a reality-simulating AI—he creates Clay-born B to trace her disappearance. They uncover the Escher Apartment, a time-warping nexus where past and synthetic worlds collide. But as glitches reveal haunting parallels to A’s forgotten past with researcher C, the system spirals into a loop: every truth resurrects new lies.