KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
KwanTeo Night — Midsummer 2024
盛夏观潮之夜2024On the night of July 20, 2024, the regular program of Midsummer in Teoswa 2024: five Chaoshan-related short films, 100 minutes in total, hosted by renowned Chaoshan emcee Xu Youwen — "one night of compilation, five kinds of Chaoshan."
About the Topic
Midsummer in Teoswa 2024 ran from July 15 to 28, packing workshops, masterclasses, lectures, and screenings into two weeks in Shantou. On the afternoon of July 20, the "Independent Film Today" public lecture had just wrapped; at eight that evening, KwanTeo Night opened in Hall 3 of the IMAX cinema — the program described as "the regular program of every KwanTeo event."
The five films that night, 100 minutes in total, formed a moving map of Chaoshan: a Chaoshan-speaking mother walking alone through Paris after work; a father and son practicing swimming in the sea at Shantou; a boy leaving the mountains for a barbershop in downtown Chaozhou; a pig getting lost in the countryside of Haifeng; and an air conditioner that keeps a secret without a word.
The curatorial note traced the films' narrative paths: Qian Qian Que Ge and Summer's End Poem worked from the small to the large, sketching social conditions through individual trajectories; Twenty and Running Pig built explicit dramatic conflict, pulling unspoken dialogue open with structural tension; Wei stripped away complex symbols and social relations, presenting emotional intuition through a refined, minimal dramaturgy. In visual language, restraint, fluidity, romanticism, and wildness each took the lead — "filmmakers of every school, in strokes heavy and light, writing out their own Chaoshan."
"To be or not to be" echoed through the night: about staying and leaving, about breaking through hardship, about questioning identity and searching for meaning in life. The recurring fluctuation between "change and constancy" was the unspoken melody, and each film's answer was hidden somewhere in the work and its afterglow.