Announcing 2026 Fountainhead Official Selection – Short Films
After nearly three months of submissions and ten weeks of selection, Mulan International Film Festival is delighted to announce the official short-film selections for the seventh edition of its Fountainhead Competition!
Founded in 2019, the Fountainhead programme aims to discover and support emerging directors whose work is distinctively original. Over the years, we have added awards and refined the selection process, developing it into a formal competition.
This year’s selected short films will compete for the jury-awarded Award for Excellence in Artistic Exploration and the Audience Award for Short Film. Each award carries a prize of CAD $500 (approximately RMB 2,500), awarded directly to the director.
Although Mulan is still young, we have always trusted our choices. We are supported by an audience who shares our wholehearted support for young creators: they are kind, open, genuine and sincere, and they love cinema. If love cannot bring hope, it is not true love. If even love cannot bring hope, then people are no longer human. We will see what is most precious.
The following short films have been selected for the Fountainhead Competition, in no particular order.
The Girl Next Door
Director: CUI Mingjian
15 min. | 2025 | Fiction | English, Mandarin, Cantonese | English and Chinese Subtitles
North American Premiere
Synopsis
In a remote American college town, international student Rui kills her husband and spends a week with his body. Years later, their former neighbour still returns to the life next door, searching the silences and fractures of an ordinary marriage for what might have been quietly taking shape within.
Director
CUI Mingjian is a bilingual filmmaker from Nanjing, China, now based in Auckland, Aotearoa. While studying film production in the United States, she worked on over 40 short films, gaining experience across both above-the-line and below-the-line roles. From 2022 to 2024, she participated in A Wave in the Ocean, a film intensive in Aotearoa led by Jane Campion and Philippa Campbell. The Girl Next Door had its world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and was subsequently selected for the 20th FIRST International Film Festival in China, where it received the “Short of the Year” award in the FIRST FRAME section.
Curatorial Notes
The Girl Next Door is a short film written and directed by CUI Mingjian. It follows Rui, an international student who moves with her husband to a remote American college town hoping to begin a new life, only to eventually kill him in their apartment. Years later, a woman who once lived in the same international student housing looks back on the tragedy that happened “next door,” trying to understand how an apparently ordinary marriage ended in violence.
Rather than focusing on the crime itself, the film pieces together Rui’s isolation, emotional confinement, and struggles as a woman living far from home through the memories and reflections of an observer. “Next door” thus becomes more than a physical location: we may live only a wall away from another person, hear the sounds of their life and see the traces they leave behind, yet never truly enter their world. For Rui, it was the life unfolding “here”; for those looking back, it remains a life that happened “next door.”
In just 15 minutes, The Girl Next Door brings together migration, intimacy, and women’s lived experience, asking a quietly unsettling question: after tragedy has occurred, are we truly understanding another person’s life, or merely reconstructing our own version of it from the fragments left behind?
The film was selected for the Orizzonti Short Films Competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
— Louis ZHOU
Dear Kankan
Director: Hana ZHANG, Eugene LEE
17 min. | 2025 | Fiction, Hybrid | Mandarin | English and Chinese Subtitles
North American Premiere
Synopsis
Every day, I peer through a hole in the wall into the life of my neighbour, Kankan. A cockroach crawling onto a coffee mug; cotton candy from childhood. Memory obeys no order of time, while we remain forever alone within its linear flow.
Director
Hana ZHANG is a Shanghai-based visual artist, filmmaker, and writer with an MFA from Bard College. From her early work in photography and self-publishing to later ventures in installations, moving images, and stop-motion animation, Hana has gradually integrated multiple expressive media in this process, constructing an artistic microcosm that both reflects on herself and observes the changes around her. Her work has been exhibited at the A.I.R. Gallery Biennial, Mana Contemporary, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image. She was the Grand Prize winner of the 2018 MAP Toulouse Photography Festival and was shortlisted for the Three Shadows Photography Award and the PDN Photo Annual/Exposure Award. Eugene LEE holds an MFA from Bard College. He primarily focuses on audio-visual projects and installations, explores the intangibles of fleeting emotions through his works.
Curatorial Notes
Dear KanKan is a hybrid of live action and stop-motion animation, directed by Hana ZHANG and Eugene LEE. It begins voyeuristically: we peek through a hole into the room—and the life—of Chen Kankan. But somewhere along the way, the relationship between seeing and being seen quietly shifts. It becomes difficult to tell where his loneliness ends and your own begins.
I was especially intrigued by how the film uses ordinary objects and small domestic details. You look at a coffee mug and suddenly have this feeling: my life is terribly wrong. From there, the film slips into a stream of consciousness—back toward childhood, fragmented memories, the distant cries of street vendors selling cotton candy.
This delicately constructed film shows the filmmakers’ great courage to dwell in loneliness.
— SHEN Wei
Homecoming and Going
Director: Kristie KO
20 min. | 2025 | Fiction | Cantonese, English | English and Chinese Subtitles
Canadian Premiere
Synopsis
Emily has just arrived in London, while her old friend Megan prepares to return to Hong Kong and hand over her flat. One is settling in; the other uprooting herself once again. For those caught in between, returning and leaving can carry the same quiet ache.
Director
Kristie KO is a writer and director based between Hong Kong and London. Her short films have screened at Fresh Wave, Golden Harvest, Shanghai and Asian American International Film Festival. She is a USC graduate, Tribeca Through Her Lens and HAF Film Lab alum.
Curatorial Notes
Director Kristie KO’s short film Homecoming and Going follows people who, amid Hong Kong’s current wave of emigration, still choose to swim against the tide and return home, offering another way of seeing and thinking about migration from Hong Kong.
After returning to Hong Kong from studying abroad, Ko watched friends around her leave one by one during the post-pandemic wave of emigration. These personal experiences prompted her to rethink this “ever-moving” Hong Kong, and the relationship between people and the idea of “home.” The camera follows new immigrants as they land in the UK, uneasy and hopeful, and then takes us into the home of Megan, who is getting ready to move back to Hong Kong. Awkwardness meets familiarity, hope meets looking back, and every choice comes down to leaving or returning. The diverging paths of the new immigrants and the returnees carry a sense of not being ready to let go, and perhaps also a need to convince themselves: “I made the right decision.”
Amid all these departures and returns, what is repeatedly questioned and reaffirmed is still this “ever-moving” Hong Kong, and what people come to recognize as “home.” Who can truly understand the bittersweet ache of it all?
The film won the Audience Award at the 19th Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival in Hong Kong.
— YANG Linsi
Other Side of a Seesaw
Director: QIU Runfeng
22 min. | 2026 | Documentary, Experimental | No dialogue | English Subtitles
Canadian Premiere
Synopsis
Once upon a time, four-year-old Zhuang Zhou sat on one side of a seesaw, a butterfly on the other.
Director
QIU Runfeng is a filmmaker working across animation and documentary. Often inspired by the psychological effects of information overflow and semantic satiation, his work explores the displacement of history, imagination, and perception.
Curatorial Notes
Auteur QIU Runfeng has continued exploring the boundaries of animation and experimental moving image. Returning to the Fountainhead Competition for the second time, his experimental film Other Side of a Seesaw opens up another possibility for the cinema screen. “Once upon a time, four-year-old Zhuang Zhou sat on one side of a seesaw, a butterfly on the other.” We sway through a cave and find ourselves back in a world we outgrew and left behind long ago.
We always want to rationalize the breaks and reversals of time and space, to find one unified, concrete meaning. A child’s way of seeing, though, runs free, finding joy in a messy world that looks like “a ridge from the front, a peak from the side.” And so, shots from different times and places are pieced together across the screen, slightly out of line with one another. The real playground becomes lines and shapes that cross the edges of the frames and run into one another, stitching the cut-up pieces of time and space back together. Children and their playmates run and jump between frames, disappearing from one and turning up in another, and our eyes follow them on a visual adventure.
What is on the other side of the seesaw? The butterfly, another Zhuang Zhou, or ourselves as children? The answer lies in the gaps of time and space within the image, and beyond the screen, where the lines and shapes extend.
— YANG Linsi
Delay
Director: WANG Han-Xuan
15 min. | 2025 | Fiction | Mandarin, French | English Subtitles
Canadian Premiere
Synopsis
A middle-aged man comes out later in life and ends his marriage. As his son prepares for his wedding in Paris, an unexpected travel delay brings the hurt and divided loyalties that still linger to the surface.
Director
WANG Hanxuan is a New York–based writer-director. H graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and earned his MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University. His previous works have been selected for the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the 17th FIRST International Film Festival, and the 27th Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival. He currently teaches film directing at Columbia University.
Curatorial Notes
In the opening minute of WANG Hanxuan’s Delay, layered compositions and dialogue work together to tell us what we need to know. “My mom, my dad, your boyfriend, and Ana.” A few names are all it takes to make us wonder: what happened?
The film plays with simplicity and complexity. The father has a boyfriend, which has led the mother to shut him out. With their son’s wedding approaching, his parents become the two ends of the invitation that cannot quite be balanced. Even the simplest exchanges between father and son feel awkward. They are polite, talking around what they cannot say. Love hangs in the air, close yet out of reach.
The framing is precise, but WANG’s touch is restrained. He resists explaining his characters, allowing gestures and actions to speak instead. The film’s simplicity is a matter of careful choice, leaving room for the audience to look closer. Through swimming, soccer, and dancing, the quiet tension between selfishness and love begins to emerge.
— LIU Yuetong
Caught in the Stream
Director: Adela KWOK
18 min. | 2026 | Fiction | Cantonese, English | English Subtitles
Toronto Premiere
Synopsis
Over the holidays, Elaine stays behind alone in the office. Amid the mundane routines of answering emails, watering plants, and taking calls, she quietly tests the boundaries imposed on her, like a goldfish occasionally surfacing for air.
Director
Adela KWOK is a director, writer and producer based in Toronto. She began her career in grassroots organizations within the nonprofit sector, an experience that informed her interest in intimate, vulnerable stories grounded in organic rhythms and textures. Adela’s work blends surrealism and natural imagery to explore diasporic identity in North America.
Curatorial Notes
Caught in the Stream, a narrative short film directed by Adela KWOK, is like a beautiful, delicate prose poem.
During the holidays, Elaine, a Chinese woman, stays behind to work overtime at an office. She hopes to get a full-time position so that when she eventually has a child, she will be entitled to maternity leave. Inside the office, everything goes on as usual. She waters the plants, feeds the fish, takes phone calls, and types away at her keyboard, going through the same small, everyday tasks.
Through her Cantonese voiceover, we slowly begin to imagine Elaine as a fish in a tank, accustomed to living within its glass walls. Yet she can’t help wondering what it would be like to leap out of the water one day, even though she knows it might not be a wise choice.
As the first Toronto-based production selected for Fountainhead since the programme was founded, Caught in the Stream unfolds with lean, vivid storytelling, capturing a reality familiar to many ordinary people working in Canada.
— Page ZHANG
Won’t be Here
Director: TAN Jiali, ZHU Haoyuan
17 min. | 2025 | Animation | Mandarin | English and Chinese Subtitles
Toronto Premiere
Synopsis
When I am gone, who will gather the traces I leave behind? In whose memory will I linger? I won’t be here, and yet I will be everywhere.
Director
TAN Jiali is an animation Director, illustrator, and graphic designer who graduated from the Communication University of China in 2024. His previous work One Day in the Room: You and Me was an official selection of Feinaki Beijing Animation Week 2024.
ZHU Haoyuan was born in Huanggang, Hubei Province in 2002. He graduated from Communication University of China in 2024 and has directed two animated short films. Their latest film Won’t Be Here won the XPPen Award for a Graduation Film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2025.
Curatorial Notes
Co-directed by TAN Jiali and ZHU Haoyuan, the animated short Won’t be Here delicately explores the boundaries between memory, departure, and dreams. The film creates elusive connections between strangers and those who have left, and between childhood and adulthood. Yet these blurred memories carry a very real sense of pain.
What’s most striking is the distinctive sense of fluidity and fragility the directors create through animation, reconstructing distorted memories along with the people, time, and spaces distorted within them. Inside the film’s unique gravitational field, the audience rises and falls, experiencing the nonlinear passage of time, before ultimately being enveloped by the directors’ ever-expanding and intensifying private emotions.
— ZHANG Xuliang
Selection
Director: ZHANG Yaoyuan
23 min. | 2025 | Fiction | Japanese, Mandarin | English and Chinese Subtitles
Canadian Premiere
Synopsis
Xiaowei takes his son Yangyang to a football club tryout. Language, conflict, and unfamiliar social codes constantly remind them of their place as outsiders; but on this day, at least, they grow a little closer to each other.
Director
ZHANG Yaoyuan (b. 1989, Dalian, China) moved to Japan in 2014 to study filmmaking as a recipient of the Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship. He received his PhD in Film from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2024 and is a four-time recipient of the Housen Cultural Foundation Film Fund. His short films have screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival and Tokyo FILMeX, and have won Best Film at the NOWNESS New Talent Awards and Best Short Film in the Fei Mu Awards at the 8th Pingyao International Film Festival. His feature project Buy My Car received the Red Sea Film Fund Award at the Asian Contents & Film Market of the 30th Busan International Film Festival.
Curatorial Notes
This is director ZHANG Yaoyuan’s second entry to Mulan’s Fountainhead Programme.
In Selection, the director turns his camera to a Chinese father and son living in Japan. The father, Xiaowei, takes his son Yangyang to a tryout for a local youth football club. However, the language and cultural barriers constantly remind them that they’re outsiders.
Zhang has been exploring the diasporic experiences of people in Japan with deep ties to China. His previous short film, Life Is Snow, which was selected for last year’s Fountainhead, begins with a workplace dispute that rips open the deeper struggles the characters face around identity, family, and their place in society. In Selection, however, Zhang takes a quieter approach. This time, the frustration and sadness are mostly hidden in the ordinary moments of everyday life. The conflicts and turns are crafted with remarkable skill and precision, without ever feeling contrived.
What’s interesting is how the film brings together two different kinds of silence. On one hand, there are the rejections that are never directly spoken in Japanese society. On the other, there is the emotion between father and son that they struggle to express. Both are left unspoken, but one creates distance, while the other carries love.
And yet, this love cannot solve all the problems of living in a foreign country.
— Page ZHANG
Green Lake
Director: ZHU Linwei
46 min. | 2025 | Fiction | Mandarin, Yunnan Dialect | English Subtitles
Canadian Premiere
Synopsis
At a fading phosphate fertilizer plant in Yunnan, boiler worker HU Xin falls for nurse LI Yue. She reminds him of his childhood sweetheart, who drowned years ago. What passes between them may be willful illusion, with much that cannot be spoken. Like glints of light on the green lake, their love shimmers and ripples, but a missing-person case corrodes it.
Director
ZHU Linwei (b. Kunming, Yunnan Province, China) holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the Beijing Film Academy. His short film Green Lake, which he wrote, directed, and edited, was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 62nd Golden Horse Awards, and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 23rd Brive Film Festival, hosted by the French Film Directors’ Guild (SRF). The film has been selected for numerous prestigious film festivals at home and abroad, and will be distributed by ARTE. He has been selected to the 2026 Golden Horse Film Academy.
Curatorial Notes
Directed by ZHU Linwei, narrative short film Green Lake is set within the enclosed space of a phosphate factory in Yunnan. It revolves around the emotional entanglement between boiler worker Hu Xin and Li Yue, a nurse who bears an uncanny resemblance to his drowned childhood playmate, alongside an unresolved missing-person case. With cold and restrained cinematography, the film cultivates an almost hypnotic, dreamlike texture. Reality and illusion seep into one another; the protagonist cannot escape the specter of his past, and a living person becomes burdened with the projected shadow of someone deceased. The “Green Lake” acts as a polluted realm of memory, mingling life and death, desire and guilt, reality and hallucination.
Green Lake is a thoughtful work that carries forward the narrative structure of classic film noir. Displaying a highly cohesive visual aesthetic, it serves as an exemplary short-film practice that balances genre awareness and personal artistic expression.
— LIU Zhou’anqi
