A showcase of the best films from CHINA in the world today.

AUDIENCE AWARDS:
Best Short Film: WHAT DATE IS TODAY
Best Micro-Short Film: RUNNING SNAKE
Best Direction: NEVER THE MORE. NEVER THE LESS
Best Performances: FIRST SNOW
Best New Media Film: FOCUS
Best Story: THE DESTINY OF A TOOTHPASTE
Best Animation Film: SEA TAXI
Best Fantasy Film: INNER VOICE
Best Mystery Film: THE CYCLICAL TIME
Best Sci-Fi Film: THE FISHBOWL
Best Hand-Drawn Animation: QUACK
Best Stop-Motion Animation: THE SILENT GRAVE
Best Music Video: SEEK
Best Experimental Film: THE ENTRANCE LIES THERE
Best Human Interest Film: RED
Best Documentary: LAND OF SYMBIOSIS
Best Visual Design: OUTGROWING

THE FISHBOWL, 8min., China
Directed by Angela Tatiana Fonseca Galvez
In a crowded city, a mechanic robot lives its routine life—until the glass helmet protecting its head shatters. Forced to find a replacement, the robot embarks on a journey, only to slowly realize that what the glass was hiding might not need to be feared after all.

INNER VOICE, 5min., China
Directed by 黄子麒（Zachary Huang）
In an era when the technological wave is dominated by “AI”, Jian is like being trapped in a foggy forest, lost in the chaotic vortex of memory. Her warm and precious past memories with her “elder brother” have been wantonly tampered with to pieces, and each fragment can no longer be pieced together into a complete form. The strange dream, like a hideous ghost, kept disturbing Jane’s thoughts.

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QUACK, 5min., China
Directed by 坤滔 周
This short film tells an absurd story: an anteater actually works as a “teapot doctor”. Relying on its superficial and limited knowledge, it “treats” all kinds of teapots that come to it for help. In fact, it is just using the name of practicing medicine to satisfy its boundless greed. In the end, this ridiculous behavior driven by greed makes it pay a heavy price for its own avarice.

THE SILENT GRAVE, 3min., China
Directed by Ziyuan Liu
A story told by a soldier who has just escaped hell.This stop-motion short follows a survivor haunted by the flames and chaos of battle. Stripped of all glory, it bears witness to the silent trauma, endless loss, and invisible scars war leaves behind. A quiet, powerful reminder of the price paid by those who lived through the unlivable.

SEEK, 6min., China
Directed by heqi fan
This stop-motion animation short film draws inspiration from the artist’s personal growth journey, using yarn as the primary material and incorporating related material experiments. During the initial research phase, the decision was made to express personal reflections through the simple yet evocative medium of stop-motion animation. The concept stems from childhood experiences of exploring the world through touch, aiming to recreate that authentic tactile experience in the animation. Material selection prioritized raw, unprocessed elements like yarn, wool felt, and beech wood. These primal components compose scenes that convey a sense of lightness and purity.

SEA TAXI, 10min., China
Directed by 博予(BOYU) 邓(DENG)
A protagonist who is frustrated in life and feels depressed tries to come to a seaside town to find spiritual comfort. As a result, he encounters a typhoon. He gets into a dilapidated taxi and embarks on a journey full of accidents and troubles with weird carpool passengers and taxi drivers. But in the end the protagonist still finds his own happiness in this imperfect journey.

The Destiny of a Toothpaste, 3min., China
Directed by MingHo Siu
This is a story about a tube of toothpaste, from its production and transportation to its arrival at its buyer’s home. It expresses its desire for a toothbrush, but is ultimately rejected. After returning home, it is discarded by the buyer.

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The entrance lies there, 2min., China
Directed by HAOYU CHEN
Standing before two mysterious and captivating gateways, the protagonist makes a choice to venture into the unknown. After battling a crippling anxiety that threatens to break them, they finally discover an exit, only to find themselves back where they began. A realization dawns: the paths were linked all along, serving as both entrance and exit.

RED, 4min., China
Directed by Boying Cai
In a shifting, unstable world, a woman is led forward by a shadow. Bound and freezing, she stumbles, resists, and is repeatedly struck down. When the shadow fractures into countless gazes, she tears the ice from her own body, revealing the fire beneath. Each fall leaves behind red traces that gather into a vast sea of bodies. From this accumulated presence, she rises once more, breaks through the barrier above, and dives into a red-black ocean.

Running Snake, 2min., China
Directed by Boying Cai
Running Snake is a hand-drawn, frame-by-frame 2D animation tracing desire, shame, and loneliness from a young woman’s perspective. In a world where female self-expression is silenced, it transforms secrecy into a delicate visual meditation on liberation, intimacy, and the courage to be seen.

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.

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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.

OUTGROWING, 6min., China
Directed by 坤滔 周
The short film introduces a fantasy story full of bizarreness, where a lonely “bone hunter” accepts a test of human nature from the “snail man” during his journey of searching for bones.