KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
KwanTeo Night: Chaoshan Short Film Selection
新春观潮之夜2026·潮汕短片年选The eleventh spring of KwanTeo (February 20, 2026, the former Shantou Film Company): four shorts in the "Chaoshan Short Film Selection" — a DV farewell to Taipei, a phone-shot film adapted in one week, a graduation work that cast the filmmaker's own family, and a Mountain-and-Sea project polished with a full crew.
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Springtime KwanTeo 2026 took its title, "From the Top," from the moment just before a film starts — the world not yet in motion, the body already knowing. On the evening of February 20, after the opening Story Circle "Suturing and Echo," the KwanTeo Night moved into the mini screening room on the second floor of the former Shantou Film Company — once the heart of Shantou's cinema exhibition, now a yearly stage for young shorts.
The "Chaoshan Short Film Selection" chose four films, each handling a kind of distance: the distance from a city one is about to leave, from the dead, from elders left behind, from one's former self. Zheng Miaoxin's Farewell Taipei was shot during his exchange year in Taiwan — DV, uncolored, with friends as actors, weaving real relationships into fiction. Xiao Zeyu's Ji Fen came out of the KwanTeo workshop: choosing among twenty short stories by fifteen Chaoshan writers, the team shot the adaptation in one week entirely on a phone; the film later won the first Green Olive Award (audience choice). Kong Junying's graduation work Gone People was made on a twenty-thousand-yuan student entrepreneurship grant; she lived with her grandmother and uncle for a month, then invited her family to play themselves. Chen Jiaxiang's Echoes of the Long Day, a Mountain-and-Sea project, was built with cinematography, color grading, and a complete crew, with Lin Qiang's score turning the sea and mountains into a vessel for memory.
The four films were made under very different conditions — DV, phone, family actors, full crew. The post-screening conversation refused to fold them into a single "Chaoshan cinema," moving instead along actors, media, sound, color, and homecoming. "Cinema did not erase the distance; it gave relationships too hard to speak of a shape that could be watched together."
On non-professional actors, the directors shared a similar method: not demanding that family and friends reproduce a preset performance, but understanding their existing movements, rhythms, and relationships, letting the characters complete their scenes close to themselves. DV grain, a phone's lightness, and the division of labor of a professional camera system hold no simple hierarchy — each changes the filmmaker's range of action, the distance to the actors, and how much the edit can intervene. What matters is whether the choice matches the film's inner emotional structure.
The departures embedded in the films do not lead to complete severance: cinema returned the filmmakers to friends, family, and home, then brought those private experiences into shared viewing. This is where KwanTeo Night finds its purpose — rather than deciding what a "Chaoshan short film" ought to be, it provides a screen, a conversation, and a chance for works still in formation to recognize one another.