Winners of the 2024 Fountainhead Programme Announced
On the Closing Night of the 2024 Mulan International Film Festival on August 17th, the five winners of the competitive Fountainhead Programme, were announced by the Jury of the Fountainhead Programme and SHEN Wei, our Artistic Director & Co-Founder:
- Best New Director Award: Nicole Chi Amén, director of Guián
- Jury Prize for Best Short Film: XU Peiyao, director of All About Shaochang
- Best Short Film Honourable Mention: YU Chih-Chieh, director of Redacted
- Audience Award for Feature Film: WANG Ping-Wen and PENG Tzu-Hui, directors of A Journey in Spring
- Audience Award for Short Film: ZHONG Hongshi, director of Summer Knows
The five awards go directly to the winning directors. Cash prizes of $1,000 are awarded to the winners of the Best New Director Award and the Audience Award for Feature Film, and cash prizes of $300 are awarded to the winners of the Jury Prize for Best Short Film and Audience Award for Short Film.
Introduced in 2023, the Best New Director Award, the Jury Prize for Best Short Film and the Honourable Mention are awarded by the Jury. Set up in 2021, the Audience Awards are voted by the attendees at the screenings of the Fountainhead Programme.
The Jury of this year is comprised of Ms. NAI An (internationally celebrated producer), Mr. YANG Chao (director and producer of award-winning films such as Crosscurrent), and Mr. MEI Feng (Director, screenwriter, and professor at Beijing Film Academy), Ms. TAN Chui Mui (director of award-winning films such as Love Conquers All), and Ms. Jessica Kiang (independent film critic, International Programmer of the Belfast Film Festival). To the three films winning jury-selected awards, Ms. Jessica Kiang offers her praises on behalf of the Jury:
Guián: “Speaking not only to the Chinese diaspora but to the increasing number of people born to Chinese parents outside China, our winning film is an intimate portrait of an unusual homecoming, in which the traveller is coming home to a place she’s never been before. The director’s personal insights inspire joy and melancholy as her mission into the heart of her family history gives her both more and less than she expected. The film proves with wit and a light heart that the children of two cultures are not half this or half that, in fact they’re twice as blessed.”
All About Shaochang: “As Shakespeare proved in Hamlet, sometimes deeper truths can be uncovered when real life is reframed as fiction. Our winning short film moved us all deeply, by using a high-risk strategy of reconstruction and performance to probe a painful absence around which a family orbits, the way a galaxy might orbit a black hole. The resulting film has both the formal control of a cleverly constructed narrative and a sense of dangerous, unpredictable life and becomes an emotional tribute, not so much to the absent loved one, but to those who live on with his loss.”
Redacted: “In a very strong selection of short films, perhaps the most purely entertaining and enjoyable was a funny, inventive, cleverly shot movie that never stops surprising the audience, to the point that even to reveal its genre would be a spoiler — let’s just say it got its teeth into us from the beginning and never let go.”
Mr. YANG Chao also shared his words of recommendation for the winner of Jury Prize for Best Short Film, All About Shaochang (English version translated by Promise XU): “The unknown death of Shaochang and the lasting trauma it brought to his family form the initial suspense and draw us in with a question: Why not explore Shaochang directly through a documentary, but instead have family members re-enacting themselves in a drama? The answer, narrative- and structure-wise, comes when the father suddenly breaks down in tears, striking both the audience and his “on-screen” daughter. We are not watching a film about the past of Shaochan’s mysterious death, but the present of his family trying to carry on with the pain. For all the varying degrees of pain the daughter inflicts on her family members by probing the old wound, love and all its gentleness are their responses back. The director effortlessly and seamlessly weaves the self-documentary and meta-film techniques into the narrative. We discover, with the concise mise-en-scene, that under the disguise of seeking the truth, it is actually a work of confirming and re-affirming love. The real watershed moment comes through the tears shared by father and daughter. We might not be able to tell fiction from documentary, but the love at this moment, stands true and tall to us.”
SHEN Wei, our Artistic Director, offers her congratulations to everyone whose work has been selected to the Fountainhead programme: “Thank you to all the young filmmakers who, in these unprecedented and complex times, continue to create, leading us to transcend the boundaries of reality with your unique perspectives and boundless imagination. Your voices belong not only to the silver screen and to today, but they will also resonate in a future that lives within our hearts.”
The Fountainhead Programme, established in 2019, celebrates and promotes emerging talents and their works with creative originality. Entries were collected via an open call for submission. They were then reviewed and selected by our Programming Team. The Jury attended the screenings of films in the Fountainhead programme in-person, and discussed and voted to decide the winning directors.
The other titles in the 2024 Official Selection are: Parkland of May the Lord Protect Us by JIANG Geng, A Year Apart by Ocean CHIN, Chan Is Fishing by Jacqueline CHAN, Two Suns by LAI Yuqing, Sojourn to Shangri-La by LIN Yihan, Dreaming & Dying by Nelson YEO, Another Day of Hope by LIU Taifeng, and Borrowed Time by CHOY Ji.
