Theme of MulanIFF2026: A Willful Illusion
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. Usually, I settle on the Chinese wording first, then ponder on a resonating English expression.
“Hope” in 2022 needs no explanation. At the end of January, Ontario’s theatres reopened at 50% capacity. In March, we became the first festival to return to Innis Town Hall for in-person screenings, where we welcomed a small crowd. In August, our third edition went ahead as planned, opening with Keep Rolling (dir. MAN Lim Chung), the documentary on the lifelong career of Ann HUI.
“Nonconforming” was born of an intense desire that built up through my everyday film viewing and through selecting films for our festival. After watching more and more works by emerging directors that imitated the techniques of “masters,” played things excessively safe, or were maddeningly stale at the core, that weariness peaked in 2023.
In 2024, I chose “Pò” (to break, to rupture). I had been deeply struck by the deterioration and desolation visible in many cities after prolonged lockdowns. At the same time, arts organizations everywhere were facing budget cuts and layoffs. But we were determined to push ahead with our Debut Feature Development Lab. This was the fifth edition; it called for a small milestone, a breakthrough made against the current.
“Obscura” came to me last year while I was ill and laid up at home. By then we already knew that, for lack of funding, the Lab could not run every year. And our most important programme, the Fountainhead competition, would also have to change: shorts only for the year, with features selected biennially. Obscura is both an unspoken uncertainty and the unknown that takes shape inside the camera obscura.
This year’s theme is yīxiāng qíngyuàn 一厢情愿 (commonly translated as “wishful thinking”).
Eland ZHU, Gavin OUYANG and I got together a few months ago, and we chatted about the film Night King (see Eland’s Chinese essay here). After seeing it in the theatre, Gavin messaged us: he decided to name one of his original cocktails—one that had remained nameless for a long time—一厢情愿.
Then I said, that would be our theme for this year.
On the surface, it may seem like an impulsive and arbitrary choice. But as Gavin put it, it appeared at exactly the right moment, and was picked up, precisely because something that had long existed in the subconscious finally found its name.
The corresponding English phrase is “A Willful Illusion.” “Willful” suggests something being pursued deliberately, even obstinately. “Illusion” was inspired by Teo Ruiz, a historian I deeply admire. In his book The Terror of History, he quotes a correspondent: “the whole elaborate array of ways of distracting ourselves, of coping with the inexplicable, of dealing with the terrible things that life and history sometimes throw our individual and collective ways are illusions.”
The Mulan International Film Festival has been a kind of willful illusion from the very beginning: believing that Toronto needs a pan-Chinese film festival, that audiences will come, that the next generation of directors will grow, that female filmmakers, marginalized visual works, and the lived experience of the diaspora deserve to be seen.
Even if no one answers. Even if the results fall short. Even if the future we imagine is an illusion. Still, year after year, we have kept making it. It has to be made.
Every past theme still speaks to who we are today. The reasons behind every film we have chosen under those themes are more than I can lay out here, but at the right moment, the threads connecting the past and the future will become clearer. Slowly, one step at a time.
