"This Festival's Surprises Are Chinese-Language Cinema's Surprises": What Its Founder Has Been Through in 11 Years

Eleven years. It started out of sheer enthusiasm; it became an effort to open up an unknown market.

Ma Kai shared the list of finalists for the 11th FIRST Youth Film Festival on his WeChat Moments and wrote: "One-year anniversary."

He directed the film Possessed (《中邪》). In July 2016, Ma Kai, then 27, brought his debut horror feature — built around rural "soul-returning" rituals — to FIRST, where it duly frightened a wave of viewers and won the Best Artistic Exploration Award. With that, he stopped being a background extra in Hengdian and became the thing he had dreamed of being: a director.

In recent years more newcomers like Ma Kai have drawn their first attention at the FIRST Youth Film Festival in Xining, Qinghai — and pulled the public's gaze toward the festival itself. Besides Possessed in 2016 there was Zhang Dalei's The Summer Is Gone, which went on to win Best Feature Film at the Golden Horse Awards; in 2015, Wang Yichun's crime-tinged coming-of-age film What's in the Darkness; and in 2014, Xin Yukun's much-discussed mystery The Coffin in the Mountain.

This year on Youth Day, May 4, the festival held its annual kickoff press conference in Beijing. Lou Ye, this year's jury president, said: "Looking back at the past few editions, the surprises of the FIRST festival have been the surprises of Chinese-language cinema."

The 11th FIRST runs from July 21 to 30. Forty-five features and shorts made the competition lineup, including the most closely watched group, 11 narrative features — some of them already favorites. Cai Chengjie's debut The Widowed Witch (《小寡妇成仙记》) took five nominations: Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Artistic Exploration and A Certain Stance. The official description calls it a film that "uses an absurd story and absurd methods to examine the present state of the spirit, of morality and of faith."

The competition, in fact, began long before that. These 25 features were chosen from 1,116 submissions over nearly three months of screening. Song Wen, who founded FIRST, described the process to QDaily as "very much the fable of the foolish old man moving the mountain — first-round review, second-round review, final review," one grinding step after another.

Xie Meng, one of the second-round judges, formerly the film curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and now an independent producer, told QDaily: "FIRST's influence keeps growing and the programming keeps getting more careful. It really has dug up new directors and new work that nobody was looking at."

Behind the festival sits Qinghe Tongchuang, the company Song Wen founded with chief executive Li Ziwei and partner Yang Wei. It has eight full-time staff, including the four programmers who do the most basic work of the festival — Duan Lian, Gao Yitian, Wang Yishu and Wang Tong — none of them over 27 or 28.

The most important part of preparing the festival each year, and the part that causes the most anxiety, is finding good films. Song Wen described it: "If we can't find films, we go crazy." "Every May and June we're like people who've taken the wrong medicine. We hear somebody has a good film somewhere, and it's, why won't they show it to me? Hmph. That's the feeling."

To find films, the programmers have built an informal information network among filmmakers and people in the industry, so that anything good travels by word of mouth. "Someone will tell you, this one suits your festival's temperament, go take a look," Song Wen said.

The festival's website carries one line defining it: "FIRST is the only film-festival-form service platform in China devoted to discovering and promoting young filmmakers and their work."

Song Wen told QDaily that this was the "most fundamental reason" they started the festival: "The market needs a mechanism that lets talented young filmmakers, at the earliest stage, find artistic confidence and a voice in their own work. Film school can't give you that, and no single film company can give it to you either. It depends more on whether the country has a public, service-minded institution that offers a stage."

The institution he means is the film festival. "You look at festivals in Europe and America and they are very mature at unearthing new directors."

Unlike an industry honors ceremony such as the Oscars, a film festival usually runs for several days and includes screenings, market events and other programming. Roughly 3,000 film festivals now take place around the world each year, among them the Category A international festivals recognized by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF), including the "big three" — Venice, Cannes and Berlin.

Some festivals care less about established directors than about finding fresh ones. The Sundance Film Festival, founded by the director Robert Redford in 1984, was built for independent filmmakers outside the main studios. Over the decades a run of now-famous directors — Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson — started there.

Filmmaking is a business with high costs and high risks. As QDaily wrote in an earlier article on the career paths of new directors, unknown newcomers often stake everything they have, their whole future, on a first feature, and follow one common route: win recognition at a festival first, then earn a chance at the market.

One reason FIRST has become more and more of a "surprise" in China is that new directors have few other choices. Apart from the general festivals — the Shanghai and Beijing international film festivals, Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong Film Awards — China's four big "grassroots" independent festivals in Beijing, Nanjing and elsewhere, active since 2000, have shut down one after another and faded away, squeezed by film censorship policy and short money.

FIRST only began holding the festival in Xining, Qinghai, in 2011. Its predecessor was the "College Student Film Festival" that Song Wen started at the Communication University of China in 2006.

"Our whole team came out of student film festivals. Full of idealism, a pretty goofy bunch."

Song Wen is 40 this year. He graduated from the first "drama class" Anhui University ever ran, came to Beijing in the 2000s and once had a "director's dream" of his own. ("They call me Old Song now; they called me Old Song 20 years ago too.") He started a film studio with partners and it failed badly. "What we wanted to make back then leaned art house, leaned auteur ... it was like that ten years ago and it's still like that today. Huge amounts of time wasted on useless conversations with film companies, never finding a voice, never finding artistic confidence."

Song Wen still remembers some of the directors and films from the earliest editions.

"I remember, very early on, we had a kid named Wang Wei who made a short called Child. I finished it and I was so excited. That kid was incredibly sensitive. He wrote a long post on his Sina blog, and it was written from the heart. He wrote the whole closing-ceremony night out for his teacher in this brotherly language, a little foul-mouthed even, like, why the hell weren't you there tonight, off in Paris?"

"It moved me. That piece made me think, and slowly I came to a belief: an artist really does need a public platform he can trust, one that gives him an honest assessment of his art."

Song Wen believes that, more than any "archival or academic significance," FIRST's goal is "to feed talent, even genius, into the whole film industry." His definition of talent: "We encourage auteur directors."

"Like the filmmakers, we carry a certain amount of pity and sympathy." He explained his standard: "The most fundamental thing in art is that it has to pay attention to human suffering itself. And that suffering isn't only rural. There's suffering inside city spaces too, you know. Even glamorous people have their suffering. That's the most important thing."

He offered a film from the 2009 competition as an example: Farewell (《告别》), the first feature written, directed by and starring Degena. It follows a middle-aged father adrift in the face of death — a man who left home young to chase his ambitions in Beijing, found himself powerless against the state of a state-owned film studio, and finally fell terminally ill and gave up on living. Degena is the daughter of Sai Fu and Mai Lisi, directors at the Inner Mongolia Film Studio; her film is both an elegy for her father and a gift to him.

"The work we choose has to be bound up with the lives of ordinary people. That's the most fundamental thing," Song Wen said.

Before Xining, Song Wen's "College Student Film Festival" judged only short films. It paused for a year in 2009, then was thrown together in Changping in 2010 — "done very badly." In 2011 Song Wen and his partner Li Ziwei, once a host at Hunan Television, who formally joined in 2010, gained a third partner: Yang Wei, then general manager of Minmetals Trust in Xining, Qinghai. Yang brought in the Xining municipal government and the China Film Critics Society as the festival's official organizers, which meant FIRST won the right to hold an open competition for feature films.

Speaking to the official account Yule Zibenlun, Yang Wei said: "I met Ziwei back then, got interested in the event and decided to come in, taking charge of getting it on the ground and of part of the sponsorship money."

From 2014 the festival ran entirely on market terms, responsible for its own profits and losses. The Xining government gave roughly 1 million yuan in subsidies over the first three years; after that it offered only promotional and venue support. Speaking to The Beijing News, Li Ziwei called the festival "half a charity," with annual costs of at least 7 million yuan; over several years it had lost about 10 million yuan, and that pressure could fall only on the three partners — "Yang Wei carries the most."

Yang Wei said in that interview: "If the festival's independence has to be protected and held onto, we would rather never make money. I'll keep supporting it."

But Yang Wei does not run the festival day to day; he has other roles. At the end of 2015 he became chairman of Hehe Pictures, and even before that he was not responsible for the festival's operations. Hehe's main shareholders are Minmetals International Trust and the Hehe Fund; the company became widely known for leading the box-office guarantee on Stephen Chow's The Mermaid.

During last year's FIRST festival, Hehe Pictures held its first press conference, announcing a slate of more than 20 films and a long list of celebrity shareholders — Jiang Wen, Chen Kun, Yang Kun, Cao Baoping among them — along with a deep equity partnership with Alibaba Pictures.

Alibaba Pictures also sponsored last year's FIRST project pitch.

On the 2017 finalist list, Zhou Ziyang's Old Beast (《老兽》) is one film Song Wen is especially "proud" of. It won the "Alibaba Pictures Plan A Screenplay Development Fund" at last year's pitch, was financed and produced by Dongchun Films, the company of pitch juror Wang Xiaoshuai, and has now come back to the main competition.

Unlike the competition for finished films, a festival's "project pitch" usually works as a bridge between directors and film companies. That concept also grew out of the European festivals and has since moved to the major festivals across Asia.

In Song Wen's view, the biggest progress the festival has made since it started is "the rising quality of the nurturing programs — the project pitch, the training camp."

FIRST's pitch has now been held six times; it was originally called the "New Director Program." "The early years were miserable, a real sense of failure." "There was no capital paying any attention to auteur cinema. There weren't many film companies either — sometimes 15 or 20 would come, and once they came, the deals kept falling apart."

"Running a festival depends on enthusiasm at first — guests everywhere, distinguished company, nobody in the room without a name. But to keep going you need a few things built into your character. One, at bottom you have to be a warm-hearted person. And two, you have to be able to take things — the market not understanding you, for instance, right?"

In China's theatrical market, films with art-house qualities are usually filed under "niche," at a disadvantage from the moment screens are allotted. In 2013, Hao Jie's The Love Songs of Tiedan (《美姐》), built around a village boy's sexual awakening, swept five prizes at FIRST, including Best Narrative Feature and Best Director. In fact the film had been finished long before, and for a long time it could not get a release. In the end Huaxia Film Distribution took it out, and after its release that October it took in only 680,000 yuan.

In February 2016, the first-time director Huang Yao's debut, the urban romance Love, Bliss (《欢·爱》), starring Guo Xiaodong and Yu Nan, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Love, Bliss was the winning project of FIRST's very first pitch — but four years passed before it got investment from Hairun Pictures and could be shot.

Song Wen listed a few other early pitch projects that stayed with him: Wen Muye's Lonely Island (《孤岛》) and Yao Tingting's Goose (《鹅》). He mentioned where they are now. Wen Muye caught Ning Hao's eye and is shooting the action comedy The Indian Drug God (《印度药神》) with Ning as producer. Yao Tingting directed Who Wasn't Confused in Youth (《谁的青春不迷茫》), a coming-of-age film adapted from Liu Tong's novel, which took in 179 million yuan. "They all wanted to make auteur films at the start, but in the end, for market reasons, they both made something else."

The past two years have looked much better.

Last year's pitch picked 12 films in all, and 8 of those projects have already been shot. Wang Xiaoshuai's Dongchun Films signed two of them: besides Old Beast, there is Hu Bo's The Golden Fleece (《金羊毛》).

As for the 2017 pitch, Song Wen, in the same excited tone he used about earlier directors, gave QDaily some numbers: 697 scripts submitted, and again 12 first-feature scripts heading to Xining to compete before a jury of Cao Baoping, Nansun Shi and Tang Wei. On July 25 each newcomer gets one public pitch, competing for six development grants of $10,000.

Sitting in the audience for those pitches will be the people the directors most want to reach: more than 80 film companies. The list includes big players like Alibaba and Tencent, small and mid-sized production houses like Dongchun, and, for the first time, large foreign companies like Disney and Lionsgate. Each director will also get one-on-one meetings with as many as 26 companies.

Song Wen said: "For a big festival this might not be worth mentioning. But for a small festival like ours, it makes me excited."

After the film market's fast growth from the late 2000s into the early 2010s, and with video sites rising quickly as a second way of watching movies, ordinary audiences have been changing how and why they watch. Over the past two or three years some films with every trapping of a traditional blockbuster have failed at the box office because word of mouth was bad. Others, small and mid-budget films with "art-house" qualities, have staged commercial comebacks because they got a reputation for being good.

What's in the Darkness was released in October 2016 and took in more than 7 million yuan with a screening share of 3 percent. It then went up on iQiyi at 5 yuan a view and has been played more than 18 million times, beating what it made in theaters.

Over the festival's ten days in Xining, Song Wen reads the "enthusiasm" the film companies show as the most concrete miniature of the film market, and it decides how far FIRST can go. So, as he puts it, they "hope to provide more professional service and let the market decide FIRST's life span."

The team wants that "service" to reach every detail anyone might remember. Song Wen mentioned the festival logo — "our first logo was so ugly; it wasn't until the tenth edition that someone finally said, wow, that's cool" — and the festival guidebook: "the 'market' thinks the FIRST guidebook is great. You stick it in your jeans pocket and take it anywhere."

Since 2015, every film company attending the pitch has paid a 1,499-yuan entrance fee. The team was very anxious about that, but to their delight, "in the first year we charged, more than a hundred companies signed up anyway."

Their largest sponsorship also comes from film companies. Last year it was Alibaba; this year Tencent Pictures gave the festival 2 million yuan, the largest single sponsorship it has received.

Speaking to the official account Yiyu Guancha, Tencent Pictures general manager Chen Hongwei said that besides FIRST they also work with the Beijing College Student Film Festival, the China Film Directors' Guild's Young Talent Program and Tencent Interactive Entertainment's own "NEXT IDEA." "We don't miss a single one. This is a very important direction for us — through our own effort, through our partners, through these good channels, to find creators who are genuinely outstanding, and a future that is genuinely outstanding."

Song Wen thinks "an outstanding future" is the thing film companies and a festival platform can most easily agree on, and that it stirs something up. "Behind these big companies there's the same feeling: damn it, why can't we have good movies too? That sets off a different kind of energy in them. If we have good films, then people in our industry get some face too, right? So it's a spiritual utopia. Someone — I forget whether it was a journalist or someone from a film company — said that after working so hard all year, they find it's only during those few days at FIRST that they get to talk big again, to talk about the things we used to talk about as students. Back then we talked about Béla Tarr — and now FIRST has brought him here."

At the Youth Day press conference, Li Ziwei — in a black T-shirt and jeans, holding a fan printed with the words "run wild" — described in what Huang Bo once called her "stand-up comedy" style how she got this year's jurors and guests: training-camp mentor Béla Tarr, director of The Turin Horse; jury president Lou Ye; "promotional ambassador" Zhou Xun. Her method was simply refusing to give up. Every one of them took months, sometimes years, of contact and negotiation. Besides chasing China's first-rank directors and stars, she had to "pester every single Cannes juror with emails." In the end there was always a result.

Even so, Song Wen told QDaily, this year there was a big brand sponsor they talked with for a long time, and the talks collapsed. "It's going to take time for traditional brands to accept us. Nothing to do but keep working."

The direct result of that failure is that this year's FIRST is still running at a "heavy loss."

Li Ziwei said in an interview last year that spending more than you take in is the normal state of film festivals everywhere. "Berlin, Venice, Cannes — their money doesn't come only from sponsorship. Part of it is state support, part is support from the city's own fund. It takes all three streams together to cover what they spend."

FIRST's ticket revenue is also tiny against its costs. "For the big festivals, screening revenue can fill a lot of the gap too. But how much money does my box office bring in? Who's going to watch a first feature?"

Song Wen told QDaily that in 2016 the festival's ticket revenue was about 160,000 yuan, with a 50 percent attendance rate, and only 10,000 to 20,000 yuan of that came from ordinary members of the public.

He expects attendance to climb to 70 or 80 percent this year. He had already had some good news: the festival ran a film-viewing travel giveaway with Qunar, with only 15 places, and 260,000 ordinary moviegoers signed up.

Song Wen said: "We don't want to treat film as anything else. We just want to treat film as art itself." Which also means that what they want in the end is the other end of the market: an audience that responds.

In 2012 Song Wen went to Sundance. "The atmosphere there caught me on the first day." "Let me give you one detail: I queued for a film with a group of American high school students. Those kids were there for the festival as a school activity, and they had to go back and write essays about it."

"That one thing was a jolt. At an American independent film festival, high school students were already running a cinephile club. Not ten or twenty kids — a hundred of them, standing right there. I thought it was wonderful. Just wonderful."

In recent years more than a hundred college-student volunteers have worked each FIRST festival. One Song Wen can't stop thinking about: "Last year there was a high schooler who came and volunteered for ten days right before he left to study abroad. A really great kid."

On the night of July 27 the 11th FIRST will hold its closing ceremony and hand out ten awards. Before anyone gets busy predicting the winners, Song Wen and his team have to get the event ready.

"What should the closing ceremony of a youth film festival look like? We want to take it back to something very simple, simpler and simpler. Yes — put the focus back on those young directors."

Images: film stills and photos from the FIRST official website.