With the theme of "One Heart to the Future", the grand ceremony reviewed the online audio-visual masterpieces of the past year in a condensed audio-visual language. In the five chapters of "Same Dream · Live up to Shaohua", "Same Hope · Long Source", "Tong Creation · Building Dream Future", "Tongxing · Oriental Spring Tide" and "Tongxin · Hexing World", Mango TV selected six atmospheres of "Mountain and River Map", "Super Time and Space Reunion", "Happy Friends", "Blue and White Porcelain", "Soundless" and "Run to Tomorrow" The magnificent program showing the youthful style will also officially meet the audience. In multiple forms such as national style singing and dancing, musicals, sitcoms, operas, intangible cultural heritage clothing shows, etc., this grand ceremony will show the spirit of the young people and the great prospects for the vigorous development of the online audio-visual industry.

Filmmaker Fang Li and his crew explore exhaustive historical investigation, as far as possible to find the core of the British, American, Japanese and Chinese parties and descendants, trying to infinitely close to the truth of the World War II "Death Ship" — "Lisbon Maru", which is 30 meters under the sea off the East Polar Island in Zhoushan, China.

Making-of documentary of Wei Shujun's 2021 film Ripples of Life.

In Chengdu, China, a grandfather get sick and hospitalized. His family accompanied him and commemorated him in their own way. In San Francisco, USA, music therapist Liu Xiaotian sings in order to provide hospice care to those who were dying. The constructed plot and warm records convey to us that in the face of life, old age, illness and death, cherishing the present is the best solution.

Walk the Line follows Chinese migrants fleeing oppressive policies, economic hardship, and social restrictions, joining a surge of Chinese immigration through the U.S. southern border in recent years. The documentary captures deeply personal stories of resilience, sacrifice, and hope as they face extreme physical and emotional trials across four continents. With dedicated cinematography and moving interviews, Walk the Line reveals the profound toll and determination behind this perilous journey, set against the larger backdrop of today’s global migration crisis.

The documentary marks the directorial debut of Chinese actor Zhang Zhehan, it documents his deeply personal journey of self-healing in the aftermath of a devastating cyber media storm in August 2021 that abruptly halted his acting career.

A "Chinese" father reflects on the changing relationship of China and US during his trip to Beijing to retrieve his 3-year-old "American" daughter who has been stranded because of the recent "decoupling" of the two countries. Born in China and living in the American Midwest, filmmaker Yinan Wang attempts to unpack his own experience of how a transnational migrant family deals with the distress caused by identity, nationalism, and geopolitics.

The film is a stage documentary of Zhang Jie's three closing concerts of "Wei · LIVE -" Yao · Beidou "tour held at the National Stadium - Bird's Nest in Beijing in August 2023. The tour started in Suzhou in October 2021 and ended in Beijing in August 2023, with a total of 13 cities, 23 performances, and a total mobilization of over 900000 people.

This film tells the story of 9 intangible cultural heritages, including Weifang kites, Yangjiabu woodblock New Year paintings, Zhucheng style guqin, Maoqiang, and shuttlecock, as well as the warm stories behind the inheritors. The movie is narrated by Liu Lin and consists of 9 stories. Based on the essence of real life, it breaks the creative framework of documentary and drama films, combines the popularization of intangible cultural heritage with the stories of inheritors through poetic shots, explores the boundary between reality and fiction, and uses reality as the needle and philosophy as the line to outline a life picture where recording and narrative are both external and internal.

The last days of M on the Bund, the restaurant that reinvented fine-dining in Shanghai, and its maverick founder Michelle Garnaut. A remarkable three-decade journey in China’s global city, from the changing geo-politics of the new millennium, to the importance of food and community in challenging times.

This film documents Mr Zhang Xiangqian, one of the three major cases of alien contact in China. He claims to have been taken by aliens to live on an alien planet for a month in 1985 and gained extraterrestrial knowledge. Upon his return to Earth, he taught himself maths and physics and claimed to have written the Unified Field Theory. Despite the fact that much of his correspondence was returned, he continued to insist. We visited and filmed him with scepticism and found that he did have a deep knowledge of physics and mathematics. The film leaves it up to the viewer to determine the authenticity of his experience.

A song is heard in the distance. It comes from the Hekeng village, famous for its ancient earthen buildings, also called tulou. It is where the last original Hakka families live amidst the exodus of those looking for a more modern environment. Among them there is Zhang Zhouyin, an elderly man concerned about the state of the village's temple; or her daughter-in-law, Wei Yi, who spends her entire day guiding tourists through these awe-inspiring houses. And then there’s young Zhang Weibo, her son, who manages to find joy even in the simplest of things... Hekeng: a place frozen in time whose songs have endured for centuries.

The short animation attempts to express the world view of Buddhism. Buddhism is not spiritualism as commonly understood by people. In fact, Buddhism emphasizes illusion. All things that can be perceived and thought in the world are illusions, and only the self nature is the real noumenon.

In a Manhattan apartment in New York, there lived a 96-year-old solitary elderly person, Gao Yaojie. Seen as the first grassroots AIDS activist in China, Gao was forced to flee to the United States from China at the age of 82. The elderly woman’s long and tumultuous life mirrors the turbulent modern history of China. The film documents the lonely last three months of Gao Yaojie’s life. On 10 December 2023, Gao Yaojie passed away in New York.

The third film in the "Hooly Bible" documentary series.

Ying, the son of a Chinese fisherman, devotes his heart and soul to contemporary dance. After founding his own company in Beijing, he is confronted by the challenges of the pandemic and the harshness of urban life. He eventually returns to his village to stage a monumental performance in honor of the ocean gods, in the very place where he danced for the first time.

Marking the 30th anniversary of Derek Jarman's passing, close friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton leads a poetic tribute to the late artist and filmmaker with a slow, meditative journey into Jarman’s poem "Chroma" during a visit to Beijing.

Shot in Cambodia and borrowing a title and a punk sensibility from Qiu Miaojin’s classic queer novel, Daphne Xu’s Notes of a Crocodile follows an unnamed woman who roams the streets of a Phnom Penh in flux, encountering humans and animals in her search for a lost friend.

Considering the underground as both a metaphor and a manifest reality, Zheng’s film Sinking Latitude focuses on a myth about underground flooding. The city where the story takes place (Zigong city in the Sichuan province, China) has a history of salt mining that spans more than 2000 years, and generations of residents who have lived there have passed down a prophetic myth for centuries–that due to excessive mining, the city's underground has long been hollowed out and depleted, filling with salty brine, and that one day, when an earthquake occurs, an underground flood of salty liquid, the mine itself, will surge out and engulf the city.

A dreamy journey along the corridor of Chinese history spanning more than 5,000 years, a wonderful encounter with ancient cultural relics and splendid civilization, and a shocking trip to taste the colorful Chinese culture. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France and the China-France Year of Culture and Tourism, French host Olivier traveled 8,000 kilometers from France to China, co-produced by China and France, and used 8K ultra-high-definition images to start a journey to experience the magical China.

The film records the inspiring story of a Chinese boy who was inspired to pursue his racing dream after watching the first F1 race in his hometown of Shanghai, and eventually became China's first and so far only F1 racing driver.

Centers on a married couple in their 80s who decide to divorce, which proves shocking news to the small country-town community of Huaihua in Hunan province. Director Yang, who is their granddaughter, unpicks the story behind the separation and a marriage that began 60 years ago through matchmaking.

A man lies in bed illuminated by the blue-white light of his mobile phone. He doom scrolls past cute pets, outraged opinion pieces and haunting images from the world's hotspots – and he feels absolutely nothing. With curiousity and humour, director David Borenstein travels the world to investigate how bad things really are. Who is pulling the strings when the internet makes us angry, sad, horny or just plain indifferent? And is there any way back? From the American internet troll, a burnt-out superstar in the Asian influencer industry, a cynical fake-news factory in Eastern Europe, Russian state propagandists and an online dominatrix, this is an alarming contemporary diagnosis, with a bold attempt to also look at solutions.

Chinese poet Xiuhua Yu, who has cerebral palsy, became instantly famous when her poems went viral on social media. When it happened she was stuck in a violent and loveless marriage in rural China. Director Jian Fan’s award-winning 2016 documentary Still Tomorrow followed her throughout her breakthrough year, when she gained the financial freedom to end her marriage. All that was missing was love.

Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen's plans to create an epic work depicting his homeland's tumultuous recent history.

The film "Safe and Sound" starts with a weekly piano class at the ward school, telling the story of several little assistant teachers with different personalities and their families' different life experiences and changes in fate. After a few years of bone marrow transplantation, the protagonists Haoxin and Qinxin choose to leave Yanjiao, where they have lived for many years, return to their unfamiliar hometown to start a new life, and return to campus.The film focuses on the daily life of themselves and their fellow leukemia patients before they left Yanjiao."Returning to Hometown for School" often means "Pressure" and "Confusion" for them. After experiencing multiple "Separations", the"Future"seemed so uncertain to them.

Takeuchi Ryo revisited the protagonist of the documentary many years ago and completed his ten-year promise with the Yangtze River.

Departing from the traditional factory lines of production on the plastic plant manufacturing industry. From there, the film expands into the realm of synthetic nature, portraying a highly engineered landscape,developed by startups. The images appear to be bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence as a connection to the strange and gory logics of petro capitalism and global territories of extraction.Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, serves as a temporal vector: it is the raw material for plastic plants, Revealing the absurd techno-solutionist vision of the future.

"Sweet Osmanthus Flowering Late" is a feature-length ethnographic film that envisions social rejuvenation and collective convalescence in the aftermath of the pandemic. Filmed in Wuhan, the film follows the everyday lives of three middle-class households. It postulates the existence of a mass dreaming phenomenon that facilitated fatigued Chinese inhabitants to rejuvenate themselves following the secluded episode of lived experience and to coexist with the enduring imprints of "the event" on their social lives.

The documentary Fen records the daily life of Li and Lianzi, a couple who have been migrant workers in a Chinese megacity for 20 years. Lacking local Household Registration, their adolescent elder son, Manshan, is facing a lot of stress as he prepares for the high school entrance exam. The younger son, a left-behind child, has been raised by the grandmother over these years. In hope of family reunion, Li and Lianzi want to convert to the local Household Registration through a point-based system offered by the government. If they cannot acquire enough points, Manshan will face more competition to get into public high school, and the prospect of bringing the younger son over will remain slim. What future awaits this family? Fen is the required points to convert to local Household Registration. It is the admission score for public high school. And it is the looming separation weighing on the family.

"Urumqi Middle Road" depicts the 2022 White Paper Protests in China, where people took to the streets in Shanghai and across the country to protest the draconian Zero-Covid and lockdown policies.

In the scorching heat of the Gobi Desert, an infrastructure project unfolds in the unforgiving natural environment. An endeavor so immense in scale that the individuals navigating through it appear minuscule in comparison.

Freediving champion Jessea Lu nearly died during a world-record attempt. She revisits the site of her near-death in this documentary, facing past traumas and struggling back to life.

The film takes Guangzhou-based independent music label "Qiii SnacksRecords" as a lens to show how this mosquito-sized label stirs up the city’s indie music scene through DIY music practices, rebuilding connections between people and with the "nearby."

A journey to the origins in Fangshan, China, during the Chinese New Year. Through a visual autoethnography, a young woman from Barcelona captures her grandparents’ hometown, transformed by migration. The generational void is perceived in a school without students, deserted streets, and the family home. An intimate reflection that questions the uncertain future of the village.

In the hilly city of Chongqing, a painter searches for the old apartment where he and his parents used to live. He asks local residents for directions, walks through narrow passages between buildings, and calls his 90-year-old mother for confirmation. But the city has changed beyond recognition. Behind the camera, his daughter documents his journey.

Sixteen years ago, a human trafficker broke into Wu Xinghu’s house and took his 13-month-old son. Since then, he has been on a relentless journey to find his son. In July 2023, Wu Xinghu reached out to Wang Meizhi and Wu Xuexian, the parents of another trafficked child, and they decided to meet up in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, to look for their kids together in Henan, Shandong, Anhui, and Hebei Provinces. During the search, Wu Xinghu’s parents passed away one after another, while Wu Xuexian’s child was miraculously found and rescued. This only fueled Wu Xinghu’s resolve to find his own kid.

The 92-year-old previous nightclub dancer Coby Yee decides to get back on stage again after joining the senior dance troupe Grant Avenue Follies. Together they go on a tour for the last time, bridging once isolated Chinese communities in the US, Cuba and China.

After A Bright Summer Diary (IFFR 2020) and Ningdu (IFFR 2022) we once again welcome Lei Lei to Rotterdam with this compelling tribute to bygone images and memories. As always, the mundane comes alive through a conscientious montage of gorgeous compositions. A two-part quest for what has been lost through time, Break no.1 & Break no.2 fires the imagination.

In the midst of a breathtaking landscape of mountains and lakes in China lies a hidden Taoist temple dedicated to Xiwangmu, a deity capable of granting immortality to those who achieve complete harmony with nature.

In modern day China, two women strive to preserve Nushu, an ancient secret language which bonded generations of Chinese women together through centuries of oppression in a clandestine support system of sisterhood and survival.

The film follows the people and workers of Xi'an through the whole process of making a bowl of the local special - Biang Biang noodles. The landscapes tell a story of their own, as do the faces of the people.

The ancient craft of horsetail embroidery empowers Shui women while connecting with the global fashion scene.

To find the hometown in his memories, Zhu Xin tries to restore a Song Dynasty poem from a millennia ago, setting off a journey across time and space.

Starting from the children’s party where Zhang Shengjia celebrated his ninth birthday at a KFC fast food restaurant in 2006, the Chinese artist and filmmaker’s essayistic archive film unfolds a cheerful cultural history of the birthday cake from a Chinese perspective. The convention reached China from Western Europe and North America in the early 20th century and merged with local birthday traditions. The constantly growing influence of Western consumer culture since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the 1980s was exemplified in 1990 when almost 13,000 customers were registered on the opening day of the country’s very first McDonald’s restaurant in Shenzhen.

In November 2022, the lockdown measures in Wuhan city became increasingly strict. A group of trailer workers dragged their carts through the metal barriers. This absurd game seemed endless, but an unexpected protest changed everything.