Ahem, Ahem, the Meeting's Starting — This Is the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival, 2018!

These days, nothing comes easy.

In the summer of 2018, the Shanghai International Film Festival split, subtly, into two halves. The official Daily News bulletin, reporting on the China Film and Television Leaders' Summit, quoted prominently from Zhang Piming, chairman of the China Film Foundation: "The ideological nature of film requires practitioners to promote the main melody and the core socialist values, and through them to build cultural confidence and raise cultural awareness."

"At this critical juncture as we move from being large to being strong, we need investors to strike the right balance between film as art and film as product, to respect the laws of artistic creation and to respect artists, and to act as 'volunteers' pushing forward the development of Chinese cinema — only then can we realize the dream of a strong Chinese film industry."

Online, though, what drew the most attention from this summit was a remark by Ren Zhonglun, chairman of Shanghai Film Group. He said that ticket prices below 30 yuan do harm to film.

You almost miss the topics of past years — however much they reeked of kitsch. There was "Big Data and Internet Plus" in 2015, "Overtaking US Box Office" in 2016, and "Craftsmanship" in 2017 (Peking University professor Dai Jinhua fumed at the time: "Chinese cinema has come this far, and here we are at the main forum of the Shanghai Film Festival talking about the spirit of craftsmanship — I think what we're really talking about is the bare minimum.").

At least they weren't quite so close to college-entrance-exam essay prompts.

The festival does have an official forum. In the previous three years, the theme of its first official forum was, in turn, "Internet Plus and Industrial Upgrading," "Film and Capital: Love, Don't Kill," or simply the bland "China Film Industry Summit Forum."

This year's theme is "Chinese Cinema in the New Era." There's also the "Belt and Road Film Culture Roundtable," "Reform and Opening-up and Chinese Cinema," "New Forces in Chinese Cinema: My 2035," and the "Belt and Road Filmmakers' Salon." Out of 11 forums in total, five carry themes like these.

Read the official forum descriptions closely and you'll notice that the old wording — "inviting senior industry figures to discuss from multiple angles including industry structure, film production, cutting-edge technology, talent development, and cultural exchange" — has picked up a new line: "responding to hot topics such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the 40th anniversary of Reform and Opening-up."

An exhibition hall called the "Belt and Road Pavilion" has appeared. In the handbook published by the organizing committee, its mission is "providing a more diverse platform for cultural exchange among nations," and it claims that "the pavilion's activities mainly include the promotion of Chinese and foreign TV programs and exchange sessions for international buyers."

At the "40th Anniversary of Reform and Opening-up Film Poster Exhibition," Amazing China had by far the strongest presence, occupying the most important spot in the whole show as a giant three-dimensional installation — every other film appeared only as a poster.

The exhibition's preface says it hopes these posters will lead viewers to "never forget our original aspiration and look toward the future," and to "chart a path of socialist film development with Chinese characteristics, with a high degree of cultural self-awareness and cultural confidence." At the end there is a giant button asking visitors to "like" the exhibition, with a counter above it. On the morning of June 19, the number stood at 16,170.

This year's festival really is a bit quieter than usual.

Every June, film people who could easily see each other every day in Beijing all converge on Shanghai instead, to watch films, talk business, and share a few sighs. Late at night they round up friends for crayfish — a dish you can get anywhere. Which is why some industry insiders have taken to calling the festival the "Crayfish Festival."

Since the opening on June 16, the same handful of faces have kept showing up in public. Enlight Media chairman Wang Changtian and Huayi Brothers CEO Wang Zhonglei had just appeared together at the first forum after the opening ceremony, and the next day turned up together again for another roundtable at the China Film and Television Leaders' Summit.

Zhang Zhao, chairman of Lechuang Culture & Entertainment — his company was still called Le Vision Pictures a few months ago — collected a "Chinese Film Leader" award at the same summit Wang Changtian and Wang Zhonglei attended. The next day, to the sound of that same citation, he walked onstage at his own company's press conference and held forth for more than three hours on future release slates and business plans.

Fortunes do turn. Every year, the festival's first forum reserves a seat for co-organizer Alibaba. Over the past four years, that seat has been filled in turn by Liu Chunning, Zhang Qiang, Yu Yongfu, and Fan Luyuan. Alibaba Pictures' business has not been adjusted nearly as promptly as its CEOs have.

This year the big names are basically all here — the buzz, though, is nowhere close.

Shanghai Film Group, the veteran state-owned company, put up a token booth, shrunk by at least half from past years. China 3D Digital Entertainment, the Hong Kong company behind Dynasty Warriors, had a lavish booth with no one in it.

Other booths make you wonder whether the people behind them came to do serious business at all — take the poster for Tank Noodles (《坦克拉面》) below. The background is all gunfire and explosions; in the foreground, a man who looks a lot like a Haidilao noodle chef pulls noodles by hand on top of a tank. Remarkably, you can actually find this film's registration record on the website of the former State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. The screenwriter, Qiu Lixin — assuming it isn't someone else with the same name — has twice been nominated for Shanghai's "Television Artist of Both Virtue and Skill" honor.

No one ever expected the film market at the Shanghai festival to handle actual trading — Chinese films barely have an international market, and foreign distributors won't waste their time here given China's censorship system. But in past years there were always a few well-regarded small and mid-size companies exhibiting: the online-fiction company China Literature; Chenming Media, the studio behind 20 Once Again; the visual-effects house Nuohua Shichuang. This year they are all gone.

On June 17, Huang Jianxin — director of The Founding of a Republic and producer of Operation Mekong — sat on a forum hosted by Tencent Pictures and sighed that this was the quietest festival he had attended in years. Once the buzz around movies fades, nobody wants to show up.

The forum Huang Jianxin attended was part of the 10th China Internet Audio-Video Industry Forum. Normally held around September, this year it moved to coincide with the film festival. Its organizers, besides the Shanghai municipal government, included the National Radio and Television Administration — which, in the government restructuring earlier this year, was stripped of its authority over film.

Simply because it happened to fall during the festival, it was billed as the 2018 Shanghai International Film and TV Festival Internet Film and Television Summit — so strictly speaking, when Huang Jianxin sat on that panel, he wasn't attending the Shanghai Film Festival at all. Without these eight forums, mostly devoted to web variety shows, web series, audio, and internet marketing, this year's festival would have felt quieter still.

The International Film and TV Market at the Shanghai Exhibition Center is meant for production companies to exhibit and buyers to purchase distribution rights. But compared with 2015, when Huayi and Wanda both mounted grand displays, this year the Exhibition Center has hardly any serious film companies left in it.

The handbook handed to the media doesn't even list the forums' themes or attending guests. That information can be found only on the official website and in the Golden Goblet Forum booklet given out on site.

And yet everyone seems to know exactly what they are supposed to say.

Tsinghua University professor Yin Hong, moderating the "Chinese Cinema in the New Era" forum, said: "Everyone knows this concept was put forward after the 19th Party Congress. It describes the main social-development problem of the new era — the contradiction between the people's ever-growing cultural needs and unbalanced development... For film, it's probably the same. It's the contradiction between people's desire for good films and unbalanced, insufficient development."

Last year he moderated a forum about genre film. His opening remarks then were far more concrete. He said, "From last year into this year, box office growth has stopped surging the way it used to, and has entered a period of slow growth" — and with dark-horse hits appearing all the time, "genre film has become very important to us."

This year the theme changed, so when he questioned Bona Film Group chairman Yu Dong, Yin Hong steered the talk toward Bona's commercially successful main-melody films of the past two years: "How do we better combine market and values? The mainstream market and mainstream values ultimately become what we call mainstream film. What new thinking and plans do you have in this area?"

"Today's conversation has been quite lively — everyone really spoke from the heart, inspired by the new era." At the close, Yin Hong pulled the talk back once more to the forum's new-era theme.

The industry heavyweights played along.

Wang Zhonglei talked about Huayi's films and IP development, and circled back to the new-era theme too. "Beyond its powerful entertainment and market attributes, film has one more special quality — it needs to fully embody socialist values. We want to offer projects that let audiences feel the force of social development even as they enjoy the movie. That's one of the more important things Huayi Brothers will focus on in planning future films."

Huayi Brothers has had an awkward stretch lately. Brothers Wang Zhongjun and Wang Zhonglei raised financing by pledging their equity, which drew suspicion that they were cashing out and heading for the exit. Add rumors of tax evasion, and the company has faced an unprecedented crisis of trust. Its market value now stands at just 17.2 billion yuan, down from a peak of more than 90 billion yuan.

Just before the festival opened, Huayi released a new slate under its "H Plan," its first in two years. Two years ago, Huayi loved to stress the strength of its partners — Feng Xiaogang, the American company STX Entertainment, South Korea's Showbox, Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan, Chen Guofu. Now Huayi has sorted its slate into categories, and alongside heavy-industry blockbusters and internationalized films, it went out of its way to highlight "realist subject matter that responds to today's audiences' emotional needs."

Wang Zhonglei used to talk about values, too. At ChinaJoy in 2016, he cited Huayi-produced films such as Mr. Six, Assembly, and Aftershock, stressing that these were films with attitude and values, "connected to modern people's values, notions of heroism, and every other dimension". But putting it forward as a distinct category of film looks like a first.

Many film companies now package their films in terms of values. Lechuang Culture & Entertainment released a slate of 12 IPs, and Zhang Zhao sorted them into three groups: Medical Examiner Dr. Qin embodies "the humanistic value of contemporary Chinese social stories"; The Assassin Bureau (《刺局》), directed by Gordon Chan and depicting an ancient guild of assassins, represents "an Eastern expression of the values behind the flowering of human desire"; and the silkworm-themed superhero IP Silkworm Hero (《驭蚕侠》) was handed the job of "carrying forward and spreading the values of Chinese culture."

When Wanda unveiled its slate, it still talked mainly about IP, but in discussing how it picks IP, Zeng Maojun, president of Wanda Film Group, still had to say: "First we look at the textual value of the IP. Especially here in China, we absolutely have to consider whether it aligns with mainstream values. Otherwise, many films discover a values problem late in production, and the film may never get the chance to be released."

Yu Dong didn't "fire off" any provocations this year (he once said at the festival that traditional film and TV companies would all end up working for BAT). This time it was Wang Changtian who did. He said: "Chinese film's first crisis is arriving."

Wang Changtian is worried about the market and about capital. "In 2016, box office growth slowed and everyone thought the challenge had arrived — it hadn't. Now the film industry has already seen a sharp drop in funding. Many film companies are struggling to raise money, pledging equity, watching production costs keep rising and copyright sales keep falling."

The entire film industry is overdrawing the market's trust in it. From film and TV companies paying huge sums in 2015 to acquire shell companies set up by celebrities, to regulators in 2016 suspecting overseas acquisitions were being used to move assets offshore, to the recent "yin-yang contract" scandal, the Maoyan ticket-refund incident, and director Ding Sheng's charge that Enlight's marketing and distribution spending lacked transparency — an industry dogged by scandal, after a spell in the spotlight, once again looks suspicious.

People in the industry often say that of the roughly 600 domestic films made each year, maybe only 10% break even or turn a profit. If investors can't be given enough of a return, where will the industry's financial backers come from in the future? That's the question worrying Wang Changtian.

"At the same time, because money is tight across the whole economy, many film and TV companies are now finding it hard to finance their projects. I'm basically certain that over the next year or two, several thousand film and TV companies could go under."

Video of Wang Changtian saying this quickly spread across the internet. But after the forum ended, the transcript the organizing committee distributed to the media had dropped phrases like "first crisis." At the end of the transcript, the committee added this line: "Note: When citing this transcript in your writing, please mind the context; please do not quote out of context; please respect the forum's guests. Thank you!"

As for the festival's more traditional topics, they weren't entirely absent. Director Han Yan's opening film, Animal World, drew a good deal of praise; discussing film industrialization, he cited the many shots of electronic screens the film needed, and how only one factory in Guangzhou could make screens that met the requirements. Chen Qin, an economics PhD from Fudan University, studied the relationship between word of mouth and box office and argued that films need precision marketing to sustain good word of mouth and lift ticket sales. Zhang Yang, director of Paths of the Soul, served as rotating chair of a short-film festival, hoping to promote short films and help young directors find a way forward.

If any tradition is still intact — this year, at least, you can still get your crayfish.

Cover image / stills from Animal World and The Looming Storm

In-body images / official photography, on-site photography, poster for Cell Phone 2