Young Chinese Talents

Technological innovations, combined with transformations within the film industry, have given them the opportunity to direct their first feature-length films at a much younger age than their predecessors, who entered the industry a decade earlier.

First and foremost, the rise of video discs and the Internet in the late 1990s fostered the development of cinephile practices. With access to a wide range of films from around the world, young cinephiles were able to build a solid cinematic culture, while also discovering works that sparked in them the desire to become filmmakers. This period also coincided with the arrival of digital cameras on the market, which democratized filmmaking and enabled the growth of independent production outside an industry governed by a dual commercial and ideological constraint. Some of the filmmakers featured in this selection took their first steps within this independent community, which over the course of a decade managed to create its own spaces for screening, discussion, and training. Above all, however, they nurtured the desire to work within the domestic industry so that their films could reach a broader audience, rather than being confined to international festivals and elitist independent circles.

Their aspirations began to materialize in the early 2010s, when initiatives dedicated to supporting young filmmakers—festivals and funding schemes, production and distribution companies—multiplied within a rapidly growing private sector, driven by a dynamic of financialization and platformization that had recently taken hold in the industry. By supporting young filmmakers in the development of their projects, these initiatives enabled them to break free from their dependence on foreign production structures and funding programs. In doing so, they laid the foundations for a domestic institutional framework that still exists today, despite the economic slowdown and the reassertion of control over the industry by the authorities—illustrated by the tax investigation targeting actress Fan Bingbing—which have made investors more cautious.

The films in this selection are representative of this prosperous period—whose peak is marked by Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), with a budget estimated at between 40 and 80 million RMB, a colossal sum for a young director—and of its subsequent relative decline, which has led to reduced budgets available to aspiring filmmakers.

This selection showcases a wide range of thematic and aesthetic approaches that nonetheless display a certain coherence when the ten films are considered as a whole. The themes chosen by the directors reflect their respective personal trajectories. It is therefore no coincidence that Li Ruijun—who, unlike others, comes directly from the independent scene rather than having merely brushed against it—is the only filmmaker to focus squarely on the daily lives of disadvantaged populations living on the margins of society. Return to Dust (2022) portrays a rural way of life on the verge of disappearance in the director’s home village in northern Gansu, one of the poorest provinces in the country. The film opens with an arranged marriage between a disabled woman and a farmer whose only asset is a donkey. A fragile balance slowly takes shape within the couple after they move into an old village house. Their daily life becomes filled with small gestures of mutual care that strengthen their bond in the face of villagers’ mockery. Yet their kindness and poverty leave them vulnerable to the greed of individuals seeking to profit from the little they possess—their blood, their crops, their government subsidy. Even the dilapidated house that shelters them is demolished as part of a village modernization campaign implemented by the local government. Refusing to be relocated to the nearby town, the couple undertakes the construction of a house made of rammed earth bricks, thus preserving their bond with the land. However, the wife’s illness ultimately shatters their hope of living a peaceful life together.

Released in Chinese theaters on July 8, 2022, the film was withdrawn from cinemas and streaming platforms on September 26, three weeks before the opening of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Although the authorities did not explicitly state the reasons for its removal, it seems clear that the persistent poverty depicted in the film contradicts the official discourse celebrating the success of government anti-poverty campaigns. Moreover, poverty is presented as the result of the reproduction of structural inequalities supported by government policies. The exploitative relationships between a layer of affluent peasants who have abandoned all moral scruples and a layer of impoverished peasants reflect a society in which interpersonal relations are distorted by the pursuit of personal enrichment. The withdrawal of a film that had nevertheless obtained a distribution license testifies to the difficulty of portraying social reality authentically in a market tightly controlled by censorship. This difficulty undoubtedly explains why potentially sensitive social and historical themes are, at best, relegated to the background in the other films of the selection.

The most widely shared theme among the remaining films is that of childhood and youth memories. As first or second feature films written or co-written by their directors, autobiographical elements occupy a central place. It is therefore unsurprising that these young filmmakers chose to set their stories in the places of their childhood or adolescence. Beyond the economic and logistical advantages this choice offers for low-budget productions, it above all allows them to capture what remains of the atmosphere of the places where they grew up.

As the Water Flows (2025) presents a family fresco set in Kunming, the provincial capital of southwest China, whose most emblematic landscaped natural site is Emerald Lake—referenced in the film’s Chinese title. This landscape becomes the stage for incessant quarrels between three generations of the same upper-middle-class family. The three only children, ranging from late adolescence to early adulthood, suffer under the constant pressure exerted by their parents. Whether being urged to study in the United States or to choose a suitable partner for marriage, they all express resistance to these parental injunctions. One asserts her desire for emancipation through confrontation and disobedience; another retreats into lies to avoid revealing her academic failure; the youngest escapes into a gaming world where he finds comfort in compulsive eating. Their respective mothers—while the fathers are portrayed as cowardly and powerless—complain about their children’s fragility, claiming they have yet to face the harshness of life. Having grown up in difficult conditions themselves, these women aspire above all to guarantee their children’s material security. Their father, recently widowed, seeks to preserve a measure of autonomy in the face of his daughters’ suffocating attentiveness. He becomes an ally and confidant to his grandchildren, encouraging them to value kindness, love, and frugality—values opposed to the individualistic and capitalist ideals upheld by his daughters. A conflict of values thus divides these three generations: the first shaped by socialist ideals, the second raised during the Reform and Opening period after being left to fend for itself amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and the third entering adulthood in a saturated job market offering bleak prospects.

Before this film, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2019) had already explored similar issues in a family chronicle spanning three generations. The film opens with the grandmother’s birthday banquet, during which she suffers a heart attack. The question of which of her four sons will take her in crystallizes tensions that compound the difficulties each faces in daily life: the eldest and his wife are in conflict with their daughter, who refuses the marriage they arranged for her; the second son lives temporarily with his wife on their modest fishing boat while awaiting the demolition of their home; the third must pay hospital fees for his son with Down syndrome while already indebted to unscrupulous creditors; the youngest tries to escape prolonged singlehood. This family portrait, built through successive impressionistic touches, unfolds against a backdrop of urban renewal and real estate speculation that undermines the hard-won material comfort of the middle class. Rather than focusing on demolition scenes, the filmmaker emphasizes the calm and permanence of the natural park along the Fuchun River that runs through the city. A title card at the beginning informs viewers that the Kingdom of Wu was established along this river during the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), and that the scholar Huang Gongwang painted his famous scroll Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains in the 14th century, which gives the film its title. Inscribing this family story within the site’s ancient history underscores a sense of historical continuity across generations. Like many filmmakers of his generation, Gu Xiaogang left his hometown to study and work in a megacity. The sense of uprootedness induced by internal migration is undoubtedly linked to his search for emotional anchoring.

The Botanist (2025) similarly juxtaposes the mythical past of the director’s home village with its recent evolution. Located in Xinjiang Province near the border with Kazakhstan, the village has been marked by depopulation and the resulting erosion of family ties. The protagonist lives with his elderly grandmother, with whom exchanges are sparse. His mother pays them a brief visit before returning to the city where she works, showing no interest in her son. His father is never mentioned, while his uncle—who seems to have played an important role in his upbringing—has been missing for several years.

Only his older brother remains, before eventually leaving the village to seek his fortune in Beijing. His sole friend, for whom he harbors romantic feelings, is also sent to Shanghai to continue her studies. In a daily life punctuated by separations, the protagonist divides his time between watching over the family herd and gathering plants for his herbarium. Mythical tales narrated in voice-over accompany his bucolic wanderings, anchoring his solitary adolescence in a tradition on the verge of oblivion. His desire to inscribe himself within a longer lineage is thwarted by the family genealogical tree, which has not been updated to include his generation. The film ends on a nostalgic note, underscored by the protagonist’s words: “I keep telling myself that I must remember all this. If only all this were a herbarium, it could be preserved intact forever.”

The following two films recount the return to the countryside of young intellectuals living in major metropolises. In A Hostel in a Small Village (2025), the director, playing himself, returns to his hometown village with the project of opening an artist residency, hoping to benefit from local government subsidies allocated under the national rural revitalization campaign. As the hostel’s opening is promoted by local influencers, the first guests arrive and prepare to cohabit in this isolated village. While the stay in the lush mountains of southeastern China holds different meanings for each guest, all are enthusiastic about experiencing the trivial activities of rural life. Seeing an opportunity to develop local tourism, the manager organizes paid participation in pig slaughtering or sweet potato harvesting. Outside these activities, each pursues an existential quest disconnected from the contemporary reality of the place: a linguistics professor searches for a local plant bearing the name of his deceased wife; an urban planner tries to finalize an important professional project; a digital poet seeks to experience his own death; a screenwriter shares feminist reflections following a romantic breakup. As the village turns into a space for artistic performance and intellectual discussion, interactions with residents occur only during the temple fair, where the manager and his guests stage a performance revisiting local legends.

Three Adventures of Brooke (2018) was shot in a small town in northern Malaysia, home to a significant Chinese community, whose gentle pace of life reminded the director of the Beijing of her childhood. The film is structured in three parts, each beginning with the same scene: after her bicycle tire punctures on a path exposed to the blazing sun, a young woman from China asks passersby to direct her to the nearest repair shop. Each encounter leads to a different exploration of the town, deepening the relationship between the protagonist and those she meets by chance. Dialogues reveal divergent viewpoints on issues ranging from the fairness of the price of a crystal sold in a tourist shop, to the legitimacy of renovating the town’s oldest district, to ways of coping with grief. As this three-act variation unfolds, the young woman reveals different facets of her personality. In the third act, she finally reveals the true reason for her presence, shifting the film into a melodrama centered on existential questioning. Alongside a writer suffering from creative block, she searches for the Star River—which once gave the town its Malay name, whose Chinese translation corresponds to her given name—and for the blue tears, a local natural phenomenon that motivated the writer’s visit.

These two fictions, whose protagonists closely resemble their filmmakers, highlight the encounter between the idealistic aspirations of educated young adults and the reality of the places they choose for personal introspection.

The next two films combine memories of youth with a murderous plot that shifts family dramas toward the thriller genre. While continuing to draw on autobiographical elements, they discreetly move away from the traditional family drama. Fire on the Plain (2021) recreates the atmosphere of a small industrial town in northeastern China in the 1990s. The story centers on the budding romance between two adolescents, whose fathers embody two facets of regional deindustrialization. A former state factory worker, one father fell victim to massive layoffs that plunged much of the working class into precarity. His daughter longs to leave the town, seeing no future there, and dreams of moving to Shenzhen—a southern city newly opened to foreign capital that represents prosperity in her eyes. Her friend does not share this fascination. His father enriched himself through bribes received in his managerial role at a state factory, while his mother holds a design job at a cigarette brand thanks to her husband’s connections. In a society governed by informal relations, an unbridgeable gap emerges between those in power and the most deprived. This social drama forms the backdrop for a murder plot in which one of the adolescents becomes unwittingly implicated. A pivotal event abruptly ends their romance and accelerates their entry into adulthood.

The Older Brother (2019) is set amid the snowy landscapes of a small fishing town in northeastern China in the late 1990s. The story adopts the perspective of an adolescent girl gradually forced out of her inner world by external events. An oil spill first compels her only relative, her older brother, to cease fishing—their main source of income. Employed as a cleaner in a luxury hotel, he also risks losing his job due to the irregularity of his administrative status. Amid these economic concerns, their daily life is brightened by the arrival of a young woman who quickly charms them, both through the modernity she embodies and through the pop melodies she brings back from South Korea. The film’s core unfolds within this second narrative thread, exploring emotions within a love triangle. As the protagonist becomes aware of her attraction to the young woman, she is forced to witness the romantic relationship developing between her and her brother. Jealousy gradually emerges as the bond of complicity with her sole family member erodes. Her emotional confusion peaks when she begins to suspect his involvement in a murder and corruption case that plunges the town into suspicion.

It is unsurprising that this spatiotemporal setting has served as fertile ground for thrillers. Beyond the suitability of snowy industrial landscapes for creating a dark, icy atmosphere, the era is marked by a generalized collapse of moral values conducive to violence and corruption. The following two films also adopt the codes of the thriller and film noir while abandoning the coming-of-age narrative.

Are You Lonesome Tonight? (2021) seeks to reconstruct the process of recollection through which a prison inmate recounts the chain of events leading to his arrest. One night, his van hits a drunken man whom he leaves dying on the road. In the following days, as guilt gnaws at him, he encounters a woman searching for her missing husband—who turns out to be the accident victim. He befriends her and becomes her confidant. As she recounts her last moments with her husband, details resurface, unsettling his original memory of the night. The film’s narrative structure highlights the malleable, fleeting nature of memory by alternating between three temporalities: the present of narration from prison, the past of the accident night, and the development of the friendship after the accident. Continuity is ensured by the protagonist’s voice-over, guiding viewers through these timelines. Rising tension introduces narrative linearity, culminating in a bloody chase shot in chiaroscuro that shifts the thriller into film noir.

Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) also confronts viewers with the inaccuracy of memory in both its conscious and unconscious dimensions. The film is divided into two parts: the first representing conscious memory through recollection, the second unconscious memory through dream. Fragmented narratives in the first part establish an obscure plot intertwining murder and love. A deliberately blurred aesthetic conveys the misty texture of memory, while visual and sound clues are subtly scattered. The second part begins in a movie theater as the protagonist falls asleep, launching an exceptionally long single take amplified by 3D technology. In this dream, he reunites with loved ones—his unborn son, his departed mother, and the woman he loves—bringing his emotional quest to completion. The narrative unfolds cyclically, beginning on the summer solstice and culminating in a dream during the winter solstice. Daytime conscious memory gives way to nighttime unconscious memory. This juxtaposition situates the film within a philosophical reflection on the truthfulness of reality reconstructed by memory and represented through cinema.

Although these last two films depart entirely from family drama, they are nonetheless shot wholly or partly in their directors’ hometowns. As with the other films in the selection, the return home can be understood as both an aesthetic and memorial gesture— aesthetic through meticulous work on light and color that creates a distinctive visual identity, and memorial in the attempt to preserve traces of a bygone era reconstructed from present memories.

Flora Lichaa, teacher and researcher in Chinese studies