KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
KwanTeo Night — 2016
观潮之夜2016KwanTeo's very first event (February 13, 2016, Hanshan Normal University, Chaozhou): billed as the "Chaoshan New Cinema Screening & Sharing," six new Chaoshan films screened in sequence, each followed by a conversation with its makers. KwanTeo set sail from here.
About the Topic
In 2015, KwanTeo was still an idea waiting to take shape. A year later, it chose the Wei Nan International Conference Center at Hanshan Normal University in Chaozhou as its port of departure. On February 13, 2016, the "Chaoshan New Cinema Screening & Sharing" was jointly hosted by Tingchao, Naore, and eMusePictures, and co-organized by Hanshan Normal University and the Shantou University Convergent Media Lab — three local cultural organizations and two universities bringing six new Chaoshan films together in one day.
The program read like a cross-section of Chaoshan youth cinema in the mid-2010s: Chen Jianhang's Chaoshan Hot and 243, Huang Gang's Small Town Stories, Guo Jialin's Chaoshan Sugar, Chen Gongming/Zhang Xiaokang/Cai Zhuoxin's Protect Grandpa, and Li Ang's Chasing Sound & Shadow. After every screening, the makers came forward to share their creative journeys and answer questions — the "screening plus sharing" format that became the foundation of everything KwanTeo does today.
The significance of the evening lay not in its scale, but in a kind of confirmation: for the first time, Chaoshan filmmakers had a site of their own — a live room where they could see, discuss, and recognize one another. From this 2016 "screening & sharing," KwanTeo went on to bring edition after edition of Chaoshan cinema back to the screen every spring and summer, growing into the KwanTeo Night series.