Shanghai IFF 2026: Things that Change, Things that Don’t

Shanghai is a city where time seems to run faster. New metro stations are built within just two or three months, and urban redevelopment has completely transformed the face of many districts. Yet these constant changes paradoxically create an impression of standstill. Much like in 2014, when I first moved to Shanghai, groups of construction workers still squat on roadsides in the city centre, waiting to resume work on new skyscrapers, while in their immediate vicinity crowds of tourists and urbanites spend their time in cultural hubs filled with expensive restaurants and clothing stores. The same paradox of change and continuity characterises the Shanghai IFF, now at its 28th edition. Established in 1993 as a biennial film festival and turned into an annual event in 2004 – with one edition cancelled in 2003 because of the SARS outbreak – it is the oldest non-specialised competitive film festival in China.¹ 

In this report, I will first summarise the festival’s ambience and organisation from the perspective of a non-Chinese freelance international journalist, for the benefit of those who might decide to cover Shanghai IFF in the next few years. Secondly, I will discuss some of the edition’s highlights.

Introductory notes

I first attended the Shanghai IFF in 2014, when I was a student at Shanghai University, buying individual tickets for whichever screenings had not yet sold out. I vividly remember one exceptionally sunny day when I went to see a Canadian film at Hubei Cinema in the north of the city. A large crowd bustled outside the theatre, including several middle-aged men trying to resell tickets that had originally been distributed free of charge to local residents in the district. The screening was completely packed.

I was surprised when, ten years later, I found myself sitting in the same venue for my first screening at the 28th Shanghai IFF. Some things had changed. Firstly, the cinema itself. Ever since my first trip, the Hubei has been thoroughly renovated; it now features comfortable new seats, high-quality projection equipment, a coffee shop and snack bar outside the screening room, and newly refurbished toilets. Secondly, the festival organisation. When I applied for a press pass in 2019, my application was rejected because I held a research visitor visa rather than a journalist visa. This year, however, my accreditation as a foreign journalist was processed quickly and approved without complications. This reflects not only a much smoother accreditation process but also the significant impact of China’s one-month visa-free entry policy for many European citizens. Thirdly, my own interests as a viewer have changed. Instead of chasing contemporary festival films, I found myself attending a screening of Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 Indian classic Umrao Jaan, which naturally attracted a much smaller audience than the Canadian indie film I had watched a decade earlier.

However, cinema audiences have indeed declined in China over the last few years, while Shanghai IFF tickets have become considerably more expensive. Although generously supported by the municipal government, the festival still pays close attention to box-office revenue. Screenings of high-profile titles – films in the main competition or those previously shown at Cannes, Venice, Berlinale, Sundance, as well as restored Hollywood classics – are packed with young audiences, influencers, and media professionals. By contrast, screenings of lesser-known sidebar titles are often attended by elderly couples who enter the cinema holding hands. They chat throughout the film; some might pick up a phone during the screening, and from time to time you can hear a pack of snacks opening.

Among younger cinephiles there is a strong commitment to the Western arthouse ideal of the cinema as a sacred space where absolute silence should be always maintained. Older audiences’ habits are therefore frequently labelled as “uncivilised” (buwenming, 不文明）and criticised by younger cinephiles. Meanwhile, the festival organisers – weary of negative comments on Douban (Chinese IMDB) and other social media platforms – came up with solutions to make broader audiences embrace the paradigm of “cinema as a temple”. Before each screening at Hubei a volunteer sporting an elegant suit can be seen walking down the alleyways with a banner with guidelines on how to behave during the film. Personally, I find the habits of elderly audiences rather endearing. Somehow, these whispered conversations make cinema feel closer to everyday life.

Older audiences chatting during films has remained a constant at the festival. Another is that tickets for many screenings – especially restored classics and Chinese competition films – still sell out within seconds. Likewise, younger generations of cinephiles remain particularly enthusiastic about seeing classic Hollywood films on the big screen. This year, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1973) was arguably the festival’s most sought-after screening. The guest ticket allocation system has not changed either and remains vastly inefficient. Many screenings officially marked as sold out still end up with numerous empty seats because the invited guests fail to attend or too many tickets are allocated to the box office. The absence of a last-minute standby queue for accredited festival participants only makes the problem more visible. The result is a festival that, much like Shanghai itself, is constantly changing while remaining strangely the same.

Migrant workers near the Majestic Theatre

Useful tips

When applying for accreditation, there are very specific requirements for the photo, almost as demanding as those for the photographs that used to be uploaded to the visa application system. Applicants must also provide a scan of a press card or a business card proving their identity as a media professional. Since many journalists are freelancers, obtaining such a document can be difficult if one is not a member of FIPRESCI or a full-time staff member at a newspaper. However, if the person reviewing the press pass application is not overly strict, it is possible to get accredited using a self-made business card containing one’s contact information and the name of the publication or website for which one intends to cover the festival.

The ticket booking system is accessible through a Taobao mini program within WeChat. Media representatives and other accredited festival guests can reserve only six tickets in total. However, the press centre on the third floor of the Shanghai Crowne Plaza Hotel – which was built next to the Shanghai Film Centre specifically to accommodate festival guests and host some SIFF industry events – also distributes extra tickets from the box office. Usually, each journalist can obtain one additional ticket per day. In practice, however, this depends largely on timing and personal connections. Moreover, PR representatives occasionally distribute tickets to members of the press just outside the screening venues. More often, there are people selling tickets that were originally distributed free of charge to local residents. If you manage to explain that you are a member of the press and they happen to have spare tickets, some might be kind enough to give you one for free.

Finally, every evening accredited journalists can go to the 23rd floor of the Shanghai Crowne Plaza Hotel to collect a bento dinner consisting of rice and three small side dishes. That was the biggest and nicest surprise for the press corps attending the festival; personally, I would always choose food over the free coffee that Berlinale and Cannes offer to keep us up and writing. 

Treasures in the sidebars

At SIFF, the programme is huge and eclectic, to say the least. It ranges from Hollywood classics in the SIFF Rhapsody section – which regularly screens titles such as Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) or the Harry Potter franchise – to international films circulating on the festival circuit.² Alongside these are Chinese arthouse films, the Golden Goblet (Jinjue) International Competition for world premieres, several programmes of restored classics, and this year’s Country in Focus sections dedicated to Brazil, Germany, the UK, Spain, Turkey, and Australia.

The fragmentation of the programme, however, goes to extremes. There are sidebars, such as Science on the Screen, devoted to films about wildlife (mostly documentaries, but also some animated and fiction films); Frame the Game, dedicated to sports films; and In Memory Of, paying tribute to filmmakers who have recently – or less recently – passed away, which this year included several films by Béla Tarr, retrospectives of Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe, and a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Andrzej Wajda’s birth. Altogether, this year’s Shanghai IFF featured forty-nine programme sections, which speaks volumes about the festival’s fragmented and arbitrary curatorial vision.

One section in particular – Grand Landscape: A Cinematic Portrait of China – interested me the most because I discovered several Chinese films that were completely unfamiliar to me. Looking through the stills, I was immediately mesmerised by Xu Changlin’s Qiumi (Football Fans, 1962), though not because it screened right in the middle of the FIFA Club World Cup. The film unfolds over the course of a single Sunday afternoon in Shanghai, when a football match is scheduled between the Traffic Police Team and the Medical Engineering Team. The game attracts enormous public interest, and tickets are almost impossible to obtain. However, some spare ones are allocated to microcar taxi drivers who agree to shuttle football fans to the match.³ The protagonist is a taxi driver who has managed to secure a ticket, only to hide it under his cap and accidentally lose it at home. Three passengers – including a doctor and his wife – join his car on the way to the stadium, but it turns out that none of them have a ticket either. As both driver and doctor become increasingly desperate to get into the stadium, they slowly bond through a series of comic misunderstandings, ethical dilemmas, and small acts of kindness.

Football Fans

In the early 1960s, Shanghai produced a remarkable series of urban comedies, most famous among them Xie Jin’s Da Li, Xiao Li he Lao Li (Big Li, Little Li and Old Li, 1962) and Yan Gong’s Manyi bu manyi (Satisfied or Unsatisfied, 1963). Football Fans might not be as known, yet it offers a rare and valuable glimpse into popular culture and everyday urban life in the early 1960s People’s Republic of China, however idealised that snapshot might be. The costumes are particularly striking. Rather than dressing every character in plain Mao suits, the film embraces contemporary global fashion: cat-eye sunglasses, fitted three-quarter trousers, loose shirts, t-shirts, and cocktail dresses all appear on screen. The editing is equally remarkable, featuring dynamic cuts that slice movements as well as several moments that directly acknowledge the audience. In one, the protagonist addresses the camera; in another, a football is kicked directly towards the lens. Although such playful montage techniques can also be found in other Chinese films of the same period, it is the characters’ moral choices that are most emblematic of Mao-era cinema. The protagonist constantly negotiates between his desire to watch the match, his obligations towards his family and society, and his own sense of what constitutes ethical behaviour. Such educational emphasis on everyday moral decisions is rarely found in contemporary cinema, yet it generates a surprising amount of narrative suspense and emotional engagement.

Director Xu Changlin began working in Shanghai’s film industry in the late 1940s, and the legacy of pre-1949 commercial cinema remains visible in Football Fans, particularly in its fascination with popular entertainment and its romantic subplots. Twenty years later, after the political upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the first wave of the information boom brought by the Reform and Opening Up era, Xu Changlin returned wrote the script of another film included in this year’s edition: Lu Ping’s Xiao Xiao de Yue Lou (The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant, 1983). The film follows a group of young people in Suzhou who decide to open a small restaurant in the city’s historic centre. At once a romantic comedy and a practical guide to establishing a private business in the early years after such enterprises were legalised, The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant is also profoundly local in character. The screening I attended at Cathay Cinema – located on Huaihai Middle Road, the heart of the former French Concession – was packed.⁴ The audience appreciated the film’s celebration of the Suzhou dialect – which closely resembles the Shanghai dialect because of the geographical proximity of the two cities – and laughed at language jokes and slapstick humour throughout. The cinema clerk who helped print my tickets before the screening beamed at me.  The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant is a local film, and she was happy to see a foreigner watching it alongside the others despite it having only Chinese subtitles.⁵  

The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant

The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant encapsulates many of the defining themes of 1980s Chinese cinema. Romance is everywhere, with three couples formed by the end of the story. The protagonists learn how to run a restaurant, master a few signature local dishes, and even study basic English in order to welcome the Western tourists who began arriving in growing numbers as the Reform and Opening Up policies started to transform the country. Simultaneously, the film remains deeply in tune with the history of Chinese cinema. In one scene, when one of the protagonists jumps onto a sofa and performs a somersault, I immediately thought of an almost identical movement performed by a character played by the iconic Chinese actor Zhao Dan in the Shen Xiling’s classic 1930s Shanghai film Shizi jietou (Crossroads, 1937).⁶ I laughed with surprise and delight in the cinema that had witnessed the premieres of Crossroads in the 1930s and The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant in the 1980s, and now contemporary festival screenings. It made me think about the mysterious ways in which time operates in cinema spaces – places laden with images and emotions, where the remnants of the past continually come back to life in the present. 

While The Tiny Deyue Lou Restaurant references 1930s Shanghai filmmaking, Feng Xiaoning’s Huanghe jue lian (Lover’s Grief Over the Yellow River, 1999) blends elements of Maoist cinema with the conventions of Hollywood period films. It centres on an American Allied pilot, Owen (Paul Kersey), who is forced to land at the foot of the Great Wall after his plane is shot down by a Japanese warship. He is rescued by soldiers of the Eighth Route Army and local civilians. Soon afterwards, soldier Heizi and English-speaking medic Anjie are ordered to escort him to the Communist base in Yan’an, crossing the Yellow River on the way. The story is narrated in flashback by Owen, now an old man returning to the place where the events unfolded and reminiscing about how he fell in love with Anjie during the mission. The film is built around the premise of cultural conflict while simultaneously celebrating the possibility of mutual exchange and understanding. Kersey plays what is essentially a caricature of the stereotypical American as imagined through a Chinese lens. His Allied pilot is portrayed as independent, resourceful, and kind, yet his boldness and individualism repeatedly create unnecessary problems for the group escorting him. Over the course of the journey with Heizi and Anjie, however, he gradually develops what the filmmakers present as “a deeper understanding of China” and of supposedly distinct “Chinese qualities.” Lover’s Grief Over the Yellow River features breathtaking landscapes as well as Kersey’s attempts to discuss history and politics in Chinese, the lines clearly learned by heart and the tones largely missed. The film transports the audience back to a very different moment in recent history, when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it briefly seemed that Cold War divisions had been overcome. Lover’s Grief Over the Yellow River is also an artefact of an earlier phase in US–China relations, when the two countries remained on relatively friendly terms and were very optimistic about the possibilities that closer cooperation might bring, including film co-production schemes. 

Her First Taste

New directions

As for contemporary films, many titles in the Asian New Talent Competition, a sidebar devoted to debut features, proved anachronistic and overly performative, trying too hard to conform to what their filmmakers seemed to imagine international festival audiences expect from their respective national cinemas. There was, however, one film that offered food for thought: Gong Yiwen’s Yuwen de ziwei (Her First Taste, 2026), which eventually won both Best Film and Best Actress in the Asian New Talent Competition. The film follows a high school student interested in creative writing, but so far primarily active in the yaoi fan fiction community. She gradually develops a relationship with a classmate whose views on culture and life radically differ from hers. Watching Her First Taste is a curious experience because the conversations between the two teenagers often sound more like exchanges between people twice their age, while many contemporary Chinese films feature protagonists who are in their thirties but act in a quite infantile and pretentious manner. This inversion, combined with strong performances and a finely written script, makes Her First Taste a truly enchanting debut that could resonate with audiences far beyond China.

Whether the film will enjoy a successful international festival run remains to be seen, as many titles programmed at the Shanghai IFF fail to circulate widely on the circuit, let alone secure international distribution. At the same time, the organisers of the Shanghai IFF have in recent years made a visible effort to strengthen the festival’s international profile. They have increased the festival’s presence at both the Cannes Film Festival and the Berlinale by hosting industry events and using these two major market hubs to draw greater attention to Shanghai. Yet despite its A-list status, the Shanghai IFF still struggles to attract the year’s most anticipated premieres, largely because of its geographical location and the geopolitical forces that continue to shape the global festival circuit.

At the same time, this year’s edition demonstrated that some aspects of the festival are changing for the better, especially regarding its openness to international media. While doing research at the Locarno FF archives some years ago, I came across an obscure 1985 interview with the chairman of FIAPF. One remark has stayed with me ever since: what ultimately determines a festival’s standing within the international circuit is not necessarily the number of world premieres it secures, but the strength of its international media presence. If that observation still holds true today, Shanghai IFF seems to be slowly moving in the right direction.

Shanghai International Film Festival
12 – 21 June 2026
https://www.siff.com/english/

Endnotes