KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
KwanTeo Night — Springtime 2024
新春观潮之夜2024The screening night of the 9th Springtime KwanTeo (February 2024, Dahao Ancient Town, Shantou): five Chaoshan short films from 2023, traversing five versions of "Chaoshan" in a single evening. That year the screening program ran under the name "Spring Screening," an early form of the KwanTeo Night series.
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On February 13, 2024, the first day of the festival, DJ sets moved into the Chen ancestral hall in Dahao Ancient Town — the "Psychedelic Ancestral Hall" placing techno and experimental electronics inside a traditional Chaoshan space. During the day, the KwanTeo tour followed the local Dahao research group through the old town; at night, the Dahao Cinema screened Yang Yuye's The Millennium Bug and Siam, works by a creator born in 2001 in Dongguan with ancestral roots in Puning.
The screening on the second day closed the festival. Each of the five films arrived with its own origin and temperament: Yuan Yang (My Brother) and After September told stories of "times and men," anchored in brotherhood; The Right Moment and The Wandering Angel approached "the near and the self" through young women's inner and social awakenings; Corals Waiting took up the supernatural as a grammar for healing historical wounds, letting the light of Mazu reach across the Taiwan Strait. Five works, five ways of seeing Chaoshan — the program note called it "traversing five versions of Chaoshan in a single evening."
The night also planted a thread across editions: director Chen Fang of The Right Moment had earlier starred in Wu Boping's Sheng Lan's Secret Garden, screened at the 2017 Springtime KwanTeo — and seven years later, audiences found the protagonist of The Right Moment is also named Sheng Lan. The same ancient town, the same name, echoing between two Spring Festivals on screen.
From 2016 onward, Springtime KwanTeo has run every Chinese New Year. In KwanTeo's own words, it has become a New Year's gift: from KwanTeo to Chaoshan filmmakers, from Chaoshan filmmakers to their elders and neighbors, and from the land of three rivers to guests near and far. The spring screening was its heart, and an early form of what would become the KwanTeo Night series.