Year Round

To mark the Asian Heritage Month, we invite you into a cinematic cabinet of curiosities — a collection of bold, off-kilter and visionary works from the Chinese-language world. From dystopian futures to surreal realities and everyday absurdities, these films reimagine worlds on the brink — held together by wit, melancholy and imagination.

Curated by Shasha LIU (Sessional lecturer, University of Toronto), this program presents a selection of recent experimental animation films by artists from mainland China and the Chinese diaspora. Centered on the theme of memory, these works showcase how artists use animation as a medium to explore memory’s dynamic nature—whether historical, collective, intermedial, or mechanical.

The feature screening highlights four works by SUN Xun, a renowned contemporary Chinese artist known for blending traditional techniques such as woodblock printing, ink painting, pigment powder, and oil painting with digital animation. His artistic practice blurs the boundaries between drawing, painting, and animation, crafting narratives that traverse time and culture. Influenced by his upbringing in northeast China after the Cultural Revolution, Sun’s labor-intensive moving-image creations form a “theatre of memory,” weaving together realism and fantasy to challenge conventional narratives of history, memory, and politics.

The program also includes a selection of animated shorts by the emerging Chinese diaspora artist YANG Lilan. Working with machine-generated imagery, she pushes experimental animation’s boundaries, critically engaging with memory-making in the contemporary era.

Free events. Presented by the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto and Mulan International Film Festival

In a world where the pace of life seems to perpetually accelerate, physically or sensually, what grounds us amidst the whirlwind of modernity? We may be able to answer the question by looking at the places we’ve lived in for so long. What do those geographical places mean to us?

Film echoes nostalgia, transcending the constraints of time and space to evoke the essence of our homeland. Perhaps it’s the intangible element. The air we breathe, the dialects we speak, the collective wisdom accumulated over generations that imbue a place with its distinctive character.

As an ancient Chinese proverb poetically suggests, even tangerine trees growing on opposite sides of a river bear different fruits, as shaped by the unique terroir.

When filmmakers anchor their narratives in a specific time and place, they capture the essence of that life, a charm that reverberates through the screen and stirs something deep within us. It’s the unconscious undercurrent of belonging, of recognizing ourselves in the landscapes and stories portrayed.

– Curated by LIU Yuetong

In ancient times, the Yangtze River was referred to as the “Great Jiang” and the Yellow River as the “Great He”. Each word points to the one and only River, respectively, even though they are both translated as “river” into English. In the Chinese-speaking world, people learn from an early age about the rivers long extolled by the literati. The lives of people and rivers are intertwined, for better or worse.

Every year around May, the Yangtze River enters its flood season. With the advent of modernity, hydropower plants have been built one after another, altering both the River’s course and the lives of many in small towns along the River.

The River laments, bereft of heroes.

Supported by funding from Telefilm Canada.

Thanks to films and film festivals, we’ve had many opportunities to get to know the former generations of Chinese diasporas. From the discriminatory head tax imposed on the Chinese immigrants over a hundred years ago, to the wide-spread anti-Asian violence today, our history and our present tell us the same thing: each generation will have their own contemporary injustice to fight, and none of us could flinch from it… Read More