Fountainhead: Imagining the Future – MulanIFF2025

Author: SHEN Wei

The Fountainhead programme was created in 2019 to discover and support emerging directors whose work demonstrates creative originality. Over the past four editions, we’ve showcased both first and second narrative features alongside short films. In 2022, we introduced the Audience Awards. In 2023, we added our first Jury Award for Best Short Film, and Best New Director for a feature film—a modest beginning to what is now a formal competition. This evolution reflects how we’ve chosen to grow as a festival: through small but steady steps.

This year, for the first time, the Fountainhead focuses solely on short films, and we’ve expanded the selection from a maximum of 8 to 15 films. In the meantime, we’ve also replaced the “Best Short Film” with a new honour: the Award for Excellence in Artistic Exploration, which recognizes boldness of vision and risk-taking in form.

This is important: we are not here to select “the best,” but to honour the daring and the imaginative. And we hope everyone involved—from jury to audience—will join us in imagining what the future of pan-Chinese cinema could be.

To make this year’s final selections, for the first time we invited two past Fountainhead directors—YANG Linsi and LIU Zhou’anqi—to return as alumni programmers. They joined the programming team, including ZHANG Xuliang, LIU Yuetong, LOUIS Zhou, Page ZHANG, and myself—forming a team of seven, with Miranda Xu supporting us through meeting minutes and administrative coordination. Over the course of seven weeks, we watched all 110 submitted short films and discussed each one of them.

110 is the highest number of submissions we’ve received to date. But only 40 of these were directed or co-directed by women, down from 44 out of 70 last year––a significant drop in percentage. As a female-friendly, female-forward festival, we don’t yet know the reason, but it’s something we are watching closely.

If submission numbers continue to grow—say, beyond 150—it may no longer be possible for everyone to watch every film. But the small scale of a festival like ours is also its strength. This year, as always, every submission was given thoughtful consideration. Every discussion was layered, in-depth and through different lenses.

The 15 selected films reflect a diversity of creative paths. Made by filmmakers shaped by different training systems and personal histories, these works reveal what it means to assemble a team, articulate a vision, and express lived experience through forms that feel necessary, precise, and sincere. Some may appear raw—but that is part of the journey. The road ahead is full of solitude, uncertainty, even despair. Expression needs time to take shape, to meet its audience, to be tested, and to be embraced. But there is also deep, irresistible joy—when a filmmaker touches the pulse of the world through imagination, and gently shifts the boundaries of time and space.

Through this year’s selection, we hope to foster more connection:
Between filmmakers. Between audience members. Between different ways of seeing.

And we hope to keep growing—in all the ways that matter.

May we all offer these films, and their makers, our sharpest gaze, and our kindest hopes.