A Long Look at Shorts: Beijing International Short Film Festival 2024

The eighth edition of Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF) rounded off my 2024 cinematic voyage with a fine smorgasbord of moving images. From selected delights of earlier festivals like the Berlinale and Venice to eye-opening world premieres, it offered pleasures and surprises aplenty. With short films that were bold, unpredictable, and at times disorienting, my senses – fatigued from a year of festival trotting – were refreshed and challenged. 

Curating Shorts Amidst a Surplus 

“BISFF is a bit like Clermont-Ferrand or perhaps a shorts-only Rotterdam?” my friend and I mused between screenings, searching for the right analogy. “Either way, there’s nothing else quite like it in China.” While no comparison is ever exact, our observation might still offer a helpful entry point for those unfamiliar with this festival. Though young in years and modest in scale compared to its European counterparts, this Beijing festival, founded in 2017, is no less resolute in its dedication to short-form cinema. With over 2,400 submissions received last year, the festival has undeniably attracted attention from global talents, even if volume is not the sole measure of its growing prominence.   

BISFF may not be alone in the championing of short films in China, but its scope and depth make it one of a kind. In recent years, Xiamen’s HiShorts! and Shanghai’s Vita Shorts and NOWNESS Short Film Awards – each established shortly after BISFF – have gained momentum as key platforms, particularly for Chinese and Asian cinema. Yet BISFF distinguishes itself not only through its international reach but also through something rarer: a scholarly charm. In a festival landscape increasingly shaped by market-driven programming, BISFF stands out as an intellectual and reflective space, where short film is positioned within an evolving framework of craft, meaning, and experimentation. 

This critical lens informs BISFF’s curatorial vision, which brings an eclectic mix of films into conversation – works that intrigue, challenge, and even provoke their viewers. Naturally, such a lineup appeals to audiences with a taste for the unexpected. Some might describe BISFF as a festival for adventurous palates, where an open-minded curiosity is essential to savour its offerings. Its latest selection of 260 entries from around the globe reaffirmed its emphasis on novelty in film languages, featuring razor-sharp works that cut through boundaries in one way or another. Under the expansive umbrella of “shorts”, animation, documentaries, video essays, mixed media, and countless unclassifiable experiments channelled their brilliance. Yet, while the festival revels in innovation, not all innovation looks forward – what feels new at BISFF often speaks in the language of the past. Amidst bursts of edgy prose, a quiet nostalgia ran through the selection. Many works embraced analogue techniques and archival materials, their surfaces etched with dust, scratches, and chemical stains, evoking a tactile connection to cinema’s roots. For all its forward-thinking energy, the festival never ceased to remind audiences of cinema’s enduring past. This interplay between old and new, past and future, is what makes BISFF compelling: it is as much a celebration of cinematic heritage as it is a showcase for fresh voices and forms. 

BISFF, however, is never just about cinema – it thrives at the intersection of film, art, and intellectual discourse. Even its Chinese name reflects this broader identity; rather than a direct translation of “film festival”, it adopts lianzhan (Group Exhibition), a term borrowed from the art world that underscores its interdisciplinary nature.¹ This multidimensional ethos is not only a curatorial decision but also a strategy for survival as a non-profit festival in China, where financial strain, regulatory scrutiny, and the dearth of non-commercial cinemas render traditional models unsustainable. BISFF’s resourcefulness is especially evident in its venue choices, which bypass the arthouses and multiplexes typical of European festivals. While cinemas might seem like the natural home for a film festival, in China, high costs compounded by bureaucratic complexities often put them out of reach for independent programmers. To work around these limitations, BISFF partners with Beijing-based international institutions such as the UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art, the French Cultural Centre, and the Goethe-Institut China, which offer their spaces as part of a reciprocal arrangement that supports their public engagement efforts. These collaborations often take the form of free screenings and discussions, opening access to diverse audiences. More than screening sites, these venues serve as convergence points where filmmakers, artists, and scholars come together to exchange ideas and build connections across disciplines. This network outside cinema, in turn, strengthens BISFF’s flexibility and long-term viability, enabling it to reshape how short films are encountered and experienced. 

The festival expands the notion of short film, not only spatially but also conceptually. At BISFF, shorts are regarded not as mere stepping stones to feature filmmaking but as a creative choice that holds equal merit alongside longer works. “I don’t see shorts as all that different from features,” said Ding Dawei, film critic and festival director of BISFF. “Length doesn’t limit creativity.” Seven years ago, he founded the festival to address a critical gap in China’s film culture, where shorts have long been marginalised – dismissed as underdeveloped projects, confined to student showcases, reduced to commercial videos, or treated as appendages to feature-length works within festivals. In Ding’s view, shorts deserve recognition as an artistic expression in their own right, valued for their fluidity, openness, and freedom. 

Yet this perspective reveals a boundless expanse of short-length content, already immense in scale. In a world inundated with high-resolution audiovisuals, readily accessible at our fingertips, which works should be elevated from the sea of images for greater recognition? When the overconsumption of “low-quality, low-value content” – leading to “brain rot”² – defines a new generation of audiences, what should short film festivals curate? BISFF’s challenge lies in identifying what truly matters amidst the excess. “Our intention is to reflect the ever-changing spectrum of visual culture,” Ding remarked on BISFF’s curatorial stance. “But frankly, that’s an impossible mission.” He continued: “What we can do, though, is establish a scope centred on independent productions – works that exude a personal vision or cross disciplinary borders.” With a refined scope, BISFF selects works that contribute to the ongoing redefinition of film, media, and screen-based practices. 

Since its inception, BISFF has committed to exploring new sensibilities in visual arts, probing how the cinematic medium is navigated, cultivated and expanded by practitioners across different contexts of creative labour. Many of those selected for BISFF, perhaps, resist being narrowly labelled as “filmmakers”, as their practices extend into other realms, ranging across writing, painting, performance, and other art forms.³ In many ways, “moving image art” might be a more accurate term for the works shown at BISFF. While narrative-driven shorts were part of the lineup, the more I experienced the festival, the clearer it became that BISFF was seeking more than just good stories. Through its curated display of new approaches, materials, techniques and technologies, I was presented with a focused snapshot of how creatives engage with today’s media environment. 

Luci

Present Tense: Between the Past and Future

This year’s BISFF featured ten programs, encompassing competition sections, non-competitive showcases, thematic exhibitions, and a retrospective on filmmaker Miguel Gomes.⁴ While each section maintained a distinct focus, the curation encouraged us to trace resonances between works. Audiences were drawn into a layered viewing experience, where porous boundaries between programs gave rise to an overarching inquiry into the possibilities of the moving image. Explorations of form, structure, and visual language went hand in hand with contemporary anxieties about identity, memory, and the ethics of representation. Above all, I was struck by how many filmmakers experimented with ideas of history and futurity. 

Histories of violence remain a powerful source of inspiration for present-day ruminations on identity, trauma, and displacement, as seen in several shorts at BISFF. While the aftereffects of war, colonialism, and subjugation are inescapably crucial to contemporary discourse, their frequent return, I suspect, arises from a desire to reframe archival materials through new and personal lenses. 

Luci (Mateo Vega and Mathieu Wijdeven), awarded Best Film in the International Competition, offers a compelling example of how artistic endeavour bridges the personal and the historical. The archival documentary follows co-director Wijdeven’s journey from the Netherlands to the Caribbean to uncover the life and influence of his great-great-grandfather, Luci (1862-1914) – a Surinamese artist of colour and critic of Dutch colonialism – a forebear bound to him by blood yet obscured by time. Through interviews, fieldwork, and theatrical enactments, the film weaves a striking blend of fact and artistry which illuminates Luci’s presence as a lens on colonialism, activism, and diaspora. 

Another Approach

The past, of course, is not fixed; it is remembered and reshaped by those who choose to listen. Another take on historical reimagining appears in Li Yu-Chi’s Another Approach, which merges the Taiwanese filmmaker’s real visit to Okinawa with a phantasmal fabulation spun from her research and imagination, resulting in an unusual travelogue that held me spellbound. Steeped in eerie unease, Li’s film overturns the sultry, idyllic image of this beloved holiday destination by juxtaposing Okinawa’s murky, war-scarred sites with a ghostly soundscape – one that reverberates with the haunting murmurs of history, voiced by people of the past, children of the present, and the island itself. Li reconstructs the past sonically, in images where humans are missing and only echoes linger. Equally memorable was Steven McInerney’s A Monster with Its Mouth Agape, where a rare audio recording of Butoh master Ohno Yoshito choreographs dazzling visuals and stirring soundscapes into an ambience pulsing with the dissonance of post-war Japan. Transforming Ohno’s retrieved voice from the archive into the film’s kinetic axis, McInerney gives form to disembodied memories through light and motion, conjuring an atmospheric asynchrony that unsettles temporal and sensory boundaries. 

Adrift Potentials

Leonardo Pirondi expands the conversation with the past in Potenciais à Deriva (Adrift Potentials), a contemplative pseudo-diary film that reconfigures found footage of vacant spaces, fragmented voices, and elusive histories from an unfinished 16mm reel. Originally shot by an unknown artist in exile – who, like Pirondi, hailed from Brazil and relocated to Los Angeles – these recordings endure as remnants of a displaced psyche, adrift among the spectres of colonial rule, the shadows of military dictatorship, and the currents of American imperialism. Pirondi moves through the vestiges of the past, and rather than reconstructing, he unearths traces of meaning in an archaeological expedition guided by an unspoken camaraderie with a soul long lost to time.

By reclaiming voices, reframing memories, and revealing what lingers in absence, these filmmakers show that history is never a closed book, but an evolving story. Other works I saw at BISFF that follow this thread include Hana Yoo’s 2023 film Anatomy Class (Chap.2), where shadowy layers of black-and-white images unfold over spoken recollections of schoolroom frog dissections. The audio track features three individuals who, with equanimity, reflect on their youthful encounters with the anatomical experiments. Meanwhile, grainy old photographs of equipment, people, and buildings – partially exposed yet shrouded in halftone-like patterns – flicker onto the screen, their details dissolving into abstraction. Only in the end credits do we come to a spine-chilling realization: what we have just seen are archival images from the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731. The uneasy parallel between school experiments on frogs and wartime experiments on humans forces us to confront a disquieting intersection of ethics and cruelty in the name of science. More pressing, however, is the question that arises directly through Yoo’s audiovisual language: Can history, like memory, ever be “dissected” without distortion? Surviving through the malleable medium of images, history returns as an unreliable narrator. 

If history is fragmented, open, and uncertain, so too is the future. “Future Ethics”, a program curated in tribute to the festival supporters – World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) and the “One Planet” Shenzhen Natural Fund – invites ecocritical dialogue on the Anthropocene through a symphony of visual works and post-screening roundtables. Looking toward an unknown horizon, it raises urgent questions. As ecosystems collapse, technology fuses with flesh, and ideologies fracture societies, what will humanity become? The selected works suggest that humanity’s future is inseparable from the nonhuman, characterised by a complex entanglement of animals, plants, artificial intelligence, and the never-ending reach of media technologies. 

Natura 2040

Filmmakers at BISFF envision divergent futures, oscillating between scenarios driven by human action and those marked by human absence. Some imagine what a greener world might look like. In Natura 2040, Li Hantao maps a cybernetic ecology informed by the Half-Earth theory, where radical human interventions test the limits of rewilding. Running parallel to this speculative outlook, Vasco Monteiro’s The Closing of a Refinery (2023) offers a sceptical interrogation of sustainability discourse. Through a staged dialogue with ChatGPT, the film reveals a troubling overlap between AI-generated narratives and real-world climate rhetoric, where performative language risks becoming a substitute for meaningful action. Alternatively, other filmmakers contemplate futures devoid of human presence. In Susana Ojeda’s Moskitos, mosquitoes inherit the world after civilisation’s collapse, flourishing where humans could not. Meanwhile, Francesco Clerici’s Even Tide (2023) repurposes video trap footage imaginatively to depict a reality where solar-powered cameras, outlasting the filmmakers, continue documenting nature, untouched by human hands. 

Dust is a Whale, is Sunlight

What stayed with me most in this future-oriented program, however, was Dust is a Whale, is Sunlight (María Casas Castillo, 2023), a documentary that looks back five million years to imagine life before humans through the silent testimony of a whale’s fossilised remains. Simultaneously a relic of the past and a marker of deep time, the whale evokes a world that existed long before humanity, and one that will continue without us. Together with other works at BISFF, it reminds me of the fragile threads connecting past legacies to future possibilities, all braided within the “present tense” where cinema finds its power to question, unsettle, and reimagine what remains and what might still come. 

Festival as Archive

A week of feasting on shorts left me with a bittersweet aftertaste. Despite the festival’s abundant offerings, my viewing at BISFF was tempered by the limits of my own appetite; after all, one can only savour so much, even from the most lavish spread. The screenings cost nothing, yet I knew I was indulging in a luxury few could afford – spending my weekdays watching films. It came as no surprise that some screenings were attended by only a handful of audience members. 

“I wouldn’t say the attendance figures define a film festival’s success,” Ding Dawei shared. “What matters is that we bring these works to those who care.” With a light laugh, he added: “Ultimately, our mission is to archive these works. A good festival, after all, is a good archive.” 

For Ding and his team,⁵ archiving is a vital extension of curation. In a landscape where short films often receive limited exposure, the festival counters this ephemerality by systematically documenting all selected films in both English and Chinese on its website.⁶ This practice seeks to transform the fleeting moment of physical screenings into a lasting resource – consolidating cinema’s present for the future and preserving contemporary voices for later rediscovery. In today’s fast-paced media environment, such an archival gesture assumes renewed significance. Short films, especially those that experiment with form, explore niche topics, or defy narrative conventions, are particularly vulnerable to fading from view after brief festival circulation. By providing a curated space for sustained engagement, BISFF’s archival efforts expand the reach and impact of these works.  

We are not short of shorts. Festivals worldwide, from Sundance – which received over 12,000 submissions in 2024 – to countless others confirm the form’s growing popularity.⁷ What remains scarce, however, are the skilled curators, exhibitors, and archivists capable of building a sustainable ecosystem where short-form cinema can thrive beyond the momentary exposure of festival screenings. To ensure that shorts are not short-lived, what is needed is precisely this: a long, thoughtful look at shorts. 

Beijing International Short Film Festival
21 November – 1 December 2024
https://www.bisff.co/yearbook/bisff2024

Endnotes