KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
KwanTeo Night 2025 — Green Olive Award
观潮之夜2025·青橄榄奖The inaugural Green Olive Award night (July 5, 2025, Dream Cinema, Shantou): five Chaoshan short films, one audience vote. The olive is bitter first, sweet after — an emblem of young filmmakers finding sweetness through hardship.
About the Topic
KwanTeo CineLab 2025, themed "Transdisciplinary Site," ran from July 5 to 20, weaving film restoration, field dinners, a young writers' salon, and lectures by Philip Cheah and Denis Do into one summer. The KwanTeo Night was the lab's first sound: five shorts, screened in sequence, forming a fresh cross-section of the new Chaoshan short film.
The five films arrived from different cities and paths: Lin Qiying's Don't Act, Deng Lianghong's Swimming Lesson, Zhang Yang's Cosmic Interference, Long Miaoyuan's The Tea Made This Year, and Wen Baigao's Koi, Koi. Their relations to Chaoshan differed — some drawn directly from this land, others made by Chaoshan-born filmmakers in Shenzhen or Guangzhou, brought home to a hometown screen.
After the screenings, the audience voted on the evening's best film — the first Green Olive Award, with its trophy designed by artist Liu Qingyuan. The olive is a fruit essential to Chaoshan weddings and funerals: bitter first, sweet after. A year later, at the second Green Olive Night, KwanTeo co-founder Chen Boqi spelled out its meaning again: it belongs to young filmmakers, to those who search for sweetness through hardship.
The Green Olive Award has since become an annual program of the CineLab. On July 11, 2026, the second Green Olive Night took place at Hesheng Cinema, where Zhang Yang's Wedding Video Guide won again; and the 2026 Springtime KwanTeo Night screened Ji Fen, a film born of the KwanTeo workshop, which had previously received the first Green Olive Award as an audience choice — the award and the night, together, keep sending young shorts back to Chaoshan screens year after year.