Year-Round Programme

Join us in our year-round programme in between our annual festival—screenings, talks, art exhibitions and more.

2025

Re/constructing Memories: A Contemporary Chinese Experimental Animation Series

Free events. Presented by the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto and Mulan International Film Festival

Curated by Shasha LIU (Sessional lecturer, University of Toronto), this program presents a selection of recent experimental animation films by artists from mainland China and the Chinese diaspora. Centered on the theme of memory, these works showcase how artists use animation as a medium to explore memory’s dynamic nature—whether historical, collective, intermedial, or mechanical.

The feature screening highlights four works by SUN Xun, a renowned contemporary Chinese artist known for blending traditional techniques such as woodblock printing, ink painting, pigment powder, and oil painting with digital animation. His artistic practice blurs the boundaries between drawing, painting, and animation, crafting narratives that traverse time and culture. Influenced by his upbringing in northeast China after the Cultural Revolution, Sun’s labor-intensive moving-image creations form a “theatre of memory,” weaving together realism and fantasy to challenge conventional narratives of history, memory, and politics.

The program also includes a selection of animated shorts by the emerging Chinese diaspora artist YANG Lilan. Working with machine-generated imagery, she pushes experimental animation’s boundaries, critically engaging with memory-making in the contemporary era.

Animation Shorts by SUN Xun + Panel Discussion | 7 PM, Sat Mar 8 @ Innis Town Hall

The screening is followed by a panel discussion with Shasha LIU, Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, and Philippe Blanchard, Associate Professor at OCAD U, Director of the Experimental Animation program.

Philippe Blanchard is Associate Professor at OCAD U and director of the Experimental Animation program. He is a Toronto-based artist, animator and teacher. His diverse creative background (film production, digital visual effects, studio arts) has informed an interdisciplinary practice combining animation, installation, light shows, drawing, painting and printmaking. Recent projects include a residency and solo exhibition at Proyecto ‘ace (Buenos Aires) and an exhibition at Open Studio (Toronto).

Shasha Liu is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto. She graduated from the PH.D. program in the Department of East Asian Studies at U. of T in 2024. Her research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary East Asian art and visual culture, especially Chinese animation studies. Her article “Adapting Dunhuang in a Transitional Period: Negotiated Intermediality in the Deer of Nine Colours and Jiazi Saves the Deer,” won the Best Student Paper Award (First place) at the Inaugural Conference of Association for Chinese Animation Studies in 2021 and was published in the edited book Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (edited by Daisy Yan Du, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang) by the Harvard University Press in 2025.

Animation Shorts by YANG Lilan + Zoom Q&A with Director | 1PM, Fri Mar 14 @ RL 3-025 Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd Floor), University of Toronto

2024

Asian Heritage Month Series: Us Among the Mountains and Rivers

In a world where the pace of life seems to perpetually accelerate, physically or sensually, what grounds us amidst the whirlwind of modernity? We may be able to answer the question by looking at the places we’ve lived in for so long. What do those geographical places mean to us?

Film echoes nostalgia, transcending the constraints of time and space to evoke the essence of our homeland. Perhaps it’s the intangible element. The air we breathe, the dialects we speak, the collective wisdom accumulated over generations that imbue a place with its distinctive character.

As an ancient Chinese proverb poetically suggests, even tangerine trees growing on opposite sides of a river bear different fruits, as shaped by the unique terroir.

When filmmakers anchor their narratives in a specific time and place, they capture the essence of that life, a charm that reverberates through the screen and stirs something deep within us. It’s the unconscious undercurrent of belonging, of recognizing ourselves in the landscapes and stories portrayed.

– Curated by LIU Yuetong

2023

ILLUME x MulanIFF Advance Screening

July

Heroes Fall, The River Endures

In ancient times, the Yangtze River was referred to as the “Great Jiang” and the Yellow River as the “Great He”. Each word points to the one and only River, respectively, even though they are both translated as “river” into English. In the Chinese-speaking world, people learn from an early age about the rivers long extolled by the literati. The lives of people and rivers are intertwined, for better or worse.

Every year around May, the Yangtze River enters its flood season. With the advent of modernity, hydropower plants have been built one after another, altering both the River’s course and the lives of many in small towns along the River.

The River laments, bereft of heroes.

Supported by funding from Telefilm Canada.

2022

The Visionary Series

Thanks to films and film festivals, we’ve had many opportunities to get to know the former generations of Chinese diasporas. From the discriminatory head tax imposed on the Chinese immigrants over a hundred years ago, to the wide-spread anti-Asian violence today, our history and our present tell us the same thing: each generation will have their own contemporary injustice to fight, and none of us could flinch from it… Read More

REGENERATION Special Exhibition

2019

2018