Kicking off a short film career

It was when Huang Riwen, a native of South China's Guangdong province, started to study at the directing department of Beijing Film Academy in 2018 that she heard of the International Student Film and Video Festival, an annual event to boost cultural exchanges, for the first time.

"The festival is the highest-level international event held by our college," recalls Huang. "Our teachers suggested it could be a good opportunity for us to watch and learn from the excellent short movies produced by fellow filmmakers in foreign countries."

Born in Zhuhai in 2000, Huang beat around 3,000 competitors to become one of the 16 students in her class. Although shooting a feature-length movie is a dream for most film students, Huang describes herself as a comparatively "practical" person, believing a quality short work is important to lay the foundation for the future.

Raising a budget of around 200,000 yuan ($29,000), with part of the financing provided by her academy, Huang took around five months to produce Fatty, a 29-minute short film about how a plump girl overcomes low self-esteem about her body. It was inspired by her own experience.

Fatty won the 22-year-old, who graduated from the academy in summer, the best director award at the 21st International Student Film and Video Festival.

The event — which was held at the Beijing Film Academy between Nov 13 and 20 — screened the works of 56 college students, selected from 904 entries from 40 countries and regions. All these movies were screened in the college's two campuses, located in Haidian and Huairou districts, respectively.

With prestigious director Xie Fei, a 1993 winner of the Berlin International Film Festival's Golden Bear for Woman Sesame Oil Maker, serving as the jury president, the festival also invited nine veteran teachers from the academy to deliver in-depth analysis on artistic creation from their own majors. The ISFVF also screened an exhibition themed on modern movies from Japan and Spain.

The ISFVF awarded 10 works "the most popular short movies for an audience". Among them were two Chinese short movies, the animated work Goldfish Pot and live action drama One Night About My Mum.

The best drama award went to English short work A Circle, and the best animated drama was earned by Australian movie An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It. The other highlighted awards also included Chinese entry Shu An, which won best documentary, and Mexican short film Living All of Life, which earned best screenplay.

Ye Yuxin, who co-directed Goldfish Pot with two classmates from her animation major at Nanjing University of the Arts in East China's Jiangsu province, says she was excited about winning the award.

The short animated drama, which spans 10 minutes, took Ye, and another four creators, around one year to produce. Spoken in the Nanjing dialect, the movie examines an issue typical among Chinese families: The tension between a child obsessed with painting and a demanding mother just concerned about academic success.

Li Ran, the festival's executive chairwoman and dean of the International School of the academy, says the festival has ignited a craze among students. This was exemplified by the fact that most of the short film screenings were fully booked shortly after the online registration was launched.

"While the overall quantity of short movies created by students around the world saw a drastic drop over the recent three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival has still drawn a lot of foreign young talent," says Li. "With their creativity nourished by different cultures, the shortlisted entries have become a precious resource to draw a lot of Chinese students, enlightening their vision and creation."

She adds: "We have also invited established filmmakers to give lectures and share their experience in artistic creation."

As one of the guest celebrities, Li Gen, the son of prestigious actor Li Xuejian, told the behind-the-scenes stories of his directorial debut Before Next Spring, which examines the struggles of a group of Chinese expatriates in the Tokyo suburbs.

A veteran who has worked for some of China's best known international film festivals, Li Ran recalls that she has gained experience from serving as the head of the awards-selection panel of Beijing International Film Festival.

Because of her work on the panel, she was one of the first people to know who the winners of the Beijing International Film Festival awards were going to be.

She has been engaged in inviting and organizing international jurors, like Oscar-winning Danish director Bille August and director of the Disney animated classic The Lion King Rob Minkoff, to watch the nominated movies and vote for the awards.

"Sometimes, those world-renowned filmmakers would argue for a long time over the award winners. The longest such vote lasted for nine hours," recalls Li Ran, who has participated in the Beijing festival since 2014.

With such impressive moments reminding her of the dynamic era of the Chinese film industry, Li Ran says she wishes that young talent will maintain a passion and love for cinema and join more international events, such as ISFVF, to continue communicating with the world.