China’s FIRST International Film Fest Jury Decides Not To Award Best Film Prize
For the first time since the launch of the FIRST International Film Festival in 2006, the Chinese fest’s jury has decided not to award the Best Film prize.
“The function of the festival is to call out those pioneering works, to discover those who step into higher stages, and to honour those who have made their mark on the future,” said the jury, headed by Cannes Un Certain Regard winner and Black Dog director Guan Hu.
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“Looking at the creative ecology of this year’s vision, we can see good rather than outstanding, stable rather than groundbreaking. Therefore, the jury committee have decided to leave the honour of best narrative feature vacant.”
The festival is held in the city of Xining, located on the Tibetan Plateau.
The Grand Jury Prize went to Chen Yanbin’s Sailing Song of June, which is set in a small town in the mountainous southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou. The jury described the film as “sharply edged, with powerful sensory impact.”
The Best Documentary award went to I’m Gonna Find You by Meng Xiao.
Baggio Jiang won the Best Director award for his debut feature Shards, which is inspired by events during a Lunar New Year family reunion dinner that he attended in 2022. Jiang is currently a student pursuing Film and Psychology at Stanford University.
The Best Performance prize went to Huang Jingyi for Fishbone, a film about mother-daughter relationships. The feature had earlier won honors as an outstanding work-in-progress at the 13th Beijing International Film Festival.
Huo Xueying and Zhang Yudi picked up the Best Screenplay award for The Midsummer’s Voice, a coming-of-age film following a Peking Opera student entering an important competition, but facing challenges from his changing voice.
The two audience awards were bestowed on Xu Huijing’s Unstoppable and Jiang Yuzhi’s Shards in the documentary and drama feature categories respectively.
Unstoppable also picked up the top prize in the festival’s First Frame competition, which focuses on films by or about Chinese women. The documentary looks at three years in the life of Chinese world mixed martial-arts star Zhang Weili, a popular athlete in the country.
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