Photo: VCG

The 27th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) wrapped up this weekend with diverse and dynamic storytellers at its heart. From Kyrgyzstan's best feature film winner Black Red Yellow to jury grand prix winner Japan's On Summer Land and China's Wild Nights, Tamed Beasts, this  festival's new talent and traditional stories re-imagined for modern audiences captivated jurors and viewers alike.

Directed by Aktan Arym Kubat, Black Red Yellow explores Kyrgyz traditions through the story of the most skillful carpet weavers in Kyrgyzstan's mountainous region. Color symbolism is woven into its narrative - black signifies serenity and gravity, red evokes passion and impulsiveness, and yellow represents nostalgia and sorrow - creating a heartfelt portrait of tradition, character, and fate.

According to SIFF, Kubat, who previously served as the Asian New Talent jury president at SIFF, said that he will "see more of Shanghai's sights and gain even more impressions from this trip." "I'm especially looking forward to meeting the audience and potential collaborators - my expectations are enormous," Kubat said.

Cao Baoping, who also directed the thriller The Dead End, has long been regarded as one of China's most thoughtful directors. Winning the Best Director award after a decade-long gap underlines his continued excellence in Chinese cinema.

Chinese actress Wan Qian took home Best Actress, while Jose Martins got Best Actor. The Best Animated Film Award went to The Songbird's Secret (France/Switzerland/Belgium), while Best Documentary was awarded to Constanza (Spain). 

The 2025 SIFF received over 3,900 submissions, among which more than 1,820 films had their world premieres and over 520 had their international premieres, marking the highest overall premiere rate in the festival's history. 

It's worth noting that this year's main competition featured 12 works from across the country, and the award-winning films came from eight countries: China, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland, spanning Asia, Europe, and South America.

"As the only A-category film festival in China, SIFF has not only stayed true to its original intent of diverging from Hollywood's commercial rules, but also established its own stance and identity outside the European-rooted festival aesthetic, embracing diverse cultures, championing auteur cinema, and leading distinctive artistic expression," Shi Wenxue, a veteran Beijing-based culture critic, told the Global Times.

Shi added that works like On Summer Land and Lost of Balance adopted innovative and well-suited cinematography when tackling social themes such as family, gender, and education. These films each displayed their own stylistic choices in color, framing, new technologies, and new forms of expression.

The 2025 SIFF featured screenings of more than 400 movies from 71 countries and regions across 43 theaters in Shanghai, for a total of 1,500 screening sessions. Within just one hour of tickets going on sale, 92 films sold out across more than 600 screenings. Tickets for all the films up for Best Director in the main competition sold out in just 26 seconds, with a total of 370,000 tickets snapped up in the first hour.

SIFF even introduced special movie-marathon screenings. At 11:00 pm on Saturday at the Shanghai Film Art Center (SHO), three David Lynch classics — Eraserhead, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive — were shown back-to-back for a total of 372 minutes. Later that night, at 11:50 pm at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, the series Rebuild of Evangelion was screened as a marathon lasting a whopping 464 minutes.

Vina, one of the audience members who attended the marathon, told the Global Times that at first she thought she'd definitely fall asleep and that it left her body aching, but when the lights came up at dawn, she had tears in her eyes. 

"Walking out of the theater as morning broke and saying, 'It's daylight already!' to a stranger next to me, it felt like we'd spent the night together in a dream. Here we come together, and here we wake up from the dream," Vina said.