Mulan International Film Festival

Ever since restarting our festival after the pandemic, I have set a theme every year: Hope (希望, 2022), Nonconforming (叛逆, 2023), Pò (破, 2024), and Obscura (迷, 2025). Each theme grew out of something I felt strongly that year, about cinema and about the world around me, and crystallized into a word that surfaced in my mind on its own.

On the Closing Night of the 2025 Mulan International Film Festival, August 17, the stage was lit with revelation: the Jury of the Fountainhead Programme, joined by our Artistic Director SHEN Wei, unveiled the two winning works of this year’s competition. Award for Excellence in Artistic Exploration (Cash award of $300): ZHENG Miaoxin, director of F

Author: SHEN Wei This year’s “Lili vs Leviathan” programme presents four films that each approach the parent-child dynamic from a distinct angle, peeling back layers of intimacy, duty, and unspoken pain. The performances are textured and deeply felt—at times so raw they leave us breathless.

Author: Jane Hui WANG In this year’s Documentary Programme, four filmmakers from their unique angles and with deep humanistic concern, paint three intimate pictures of the challenges and struggles of the Chinese people in our modern consumerist society. In Nest and Obedience, director QIN Xiaoyue and WONG Siu-pong focus on a specific space, a cramp

Author: Karen REN “Queerness is utopian, and there is something queer about the utopian.” Taking inspiration from José Esteban MUÑOZ’s vision of queer futurity, this year’s Yin and Yang programme at Mulan wanders through the many possible worlds that queerness gestures toward. As a curator, I have tried not to define queerness, but to trace its tex

Author: SHEN Wei The Fountainhead programme was created in 2019 to discover and support emerging directors whose work demonstrates creative originality. Over the past four editions, we’ve showcased both first and second narrative features alongside short films.

This year in films we’ve seen a lot of rains, funerals, and springs; to the point that when you walk into the steaming heat of Toronto, or elsewhere in the world this summer, you start to wonder how many dimensions there are in one’s life, and how it is possible to imagine someone else’s life, in a different time, in a different place. And you’ll k