KwanTeo Film Archive · Topic
KwanTeo Night — Springtime 2025
新春观潮之夜2025The tenth-anniversary Spring Festival of KwanTeo (February 2, 2025, Huatong Cinema, Shantou): a night of six Chaoshan short films screened in sequence, with filmmakers Jiang Geng, Huang Wenli, Chen Fang, and Chen Jiazi in attendance.
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Springtime KwanTeo 2025 unfolded under the sign of "Home": a story circle called "Re-seeing Home" brought writer Chen Qiufan, philosophy scholar Chen Ye, photographer Deng Zhongting, and musician Lin Shusheng together; a residency exhibition, "Hu Maofan: Echoes of Home," opened at a seaside bookshop; two nights of outdoor screenings played Chen Xiaojie's Forest and Take Me to Your Mother at the Donghu stage; and music nights ran late into the evening.
On the fifth day of the New Year, the KwanTeo Night at Huatong Cinema offered a compilation of six shorts spanning fiction and animation: Chen Fang's The Dead Water, which had left its mark at the FIRST International Film Festival; Huang Wenli's Tea Made from Seawater, a Chaoshan-dialect story of a mother's memories at sea; Jiang Geng's Heavenly Book; Ji Zhehan's Wish of the Homeland; Chen Jiazi's animated The Vanishing Qiaopi; and A Shuang A You's The Story of Grandma Magic. Six works, six ways of telling Chaoshan, meeting on the same small-city night.
After the screening, four of the filmmakers joined the audience for conversation — another edition of the "same appointment, year after year" that KwanTeo has kept since 2016. By 2025, KwanTeo had connected more than two hundred filmmakers and witnessed the birth of more than a hundred films; and every Spring Festival, it still brings the past year's shorts home to Shantou, before the eyes of elders and neighbors — the most stable ritual it offers to its homeland.