It is all about qingnian dianying: Post-independent Chinese cinema, auteurism, and the FIRST International Film Festival

Abstract

Intersecting Chinese cinema studies and film festival studies, this article inquiries into the (re)invention and growing significance of qingnian dianying (‘youth cinema’) on the Chinese film festival scene since the mid-2010s—a period we approach as the ‘post-independent’—through a close examination of the FIRST International Film Festival. The article first uses the idea of ‘post-independent Chinese cinema’ to re-examine the contemporary cinematic field, wherein an understanding regarding the in-betweenness of Chinese independent cinema (duli dianying) and art cinema (yishu dianying) helps to contextualize our study of FIRST. Qingnian dianying is approached as a set of discourses and practices centring around the ‘networked auteurism’, which underscores the institutional configurations of the film festival network and the logic of project that the emerging film auteur correlates with and works through. In our case study of FIRST, we turn to the performativity of qingnian dianying to examine a series of festival activities wherein auteurism is articulated and realized via working through a cycle of film projects. Overall, this research foregrounds qingnian dianying as a symptom as well as a mechanism to understand contemporary Chinese cinema in transition in relation to the domestic film industry, cultural policies and the global film festival network.