Chinese Cinema in 2026: The Unwatched Interior

Zhang Yimou and Wang Bing once filmed a country capable of calling its scattered lives home to witness something together. The rooms in which it did so have since been closed, one by one.

In 1999, Zhang Yimou shot The Road Home in a village in rural north China that the film knows is dying. Its main storyline has a son, Yusheng, returning from the city for his schoolteacher father's funeral only for the mayor to warn him there may not be enough able young men left in the village to carry the coffin the traditional distance home. On the day of the funeral, more than a hundred show up anyway — former pupils, scattered by decades and the city, reassembled for one day by a custom that still knows how to call them.

The bulk of the film, told in flashback and colour counterintuitively against the contemporary period's black and white, recounts how his mother, Zhao Di (played by a debuting Zhang Ziyi), courted the young schoolteacher by cooking for him and waiting along that same road, saying almost nothing, for the better part of an hour of screen time, which is either the most patient courtship in cinema or the least eventful, and the film clearly believes both readings are compliments. Zhang Yimou knew that old customs could still summon its adherents, and wanted to show the magic at play.

Twelve years earlier he had made a similar kind of claim at far greater scale. Red Sorghum, which hosted Gong Li's debut, sold 40 million tickets at home and became the first Chinese film to win the Golden Bear (1988). Strip away the crimson cinematography and its plot turns on a young woman inheriting a winery through a fortunate sequence of deaths, which is less a sociological record of an actual Shandong village than a classic piece of 1980s "root-seeking" myth-making, and what both films shared was confidence in an audience that still recognised the old ways and stakes being filmed as its own.

Meanwhile, Wang Bing tested the same confidence within industrial China. Between 1999 and 2001 he shot, edited and effectively produced West of the Tracks alone, inside three dying state factory complexes in Shenyang's Tiexi district, as the 下岗 (xiagang) layoffs tore through what had been Maoist industrial China's model workforce. He never submitted the footage to the censors, almost certainly gambling that the local branch was itself dissolving alongside the furnaces. The resulting nine hours of footage were released in 2002. He had, for a narrow historical window, an unwatched interior — a collapse recorded before anyone thought to confiscate the camera.

Much of the silent power behind the 改革开放 (gaige kaifang) films was that Reform gave the state and its casualties a common clock. A ruined worker's life could indict the national story because both were measured against the same promise, which was essentially that wages would rise and a skyline would go up. A laid-off worker did not need much sophistication to read his own fate as allegory. The only requirement was that his own ledger and the state's be denominated in the same currency.

Today that commensurability has long since broken. National success is now measured in semiconductor fabrication nodes and a 2049 rejuvenation deadline; private life is still measured in wages and rent. The two no longer move at the same scale. Failure at one register no longer indicts success at the other. Youth unemployment supplies evidence of the divergence. The figure reached a record 21 percent in June 2023, only for the National Bureau of Statistics to stop publishing it in August. It returned five months later under a revised methodology, students excluded, and lands near 15 percent today — the kind of arithmetic a government reaches for once the true number has become an argument it can no longer afford to keep losing in public.

躺平 (tangping), or lying flat, reads as a verdict on the old promise; a refusal to keep striving towards a story that no longer touches biography. It went viral in 2021, the same year the Party marked its centenary with some of the loudest rejuvenation rhetoric to have emerged in decades. And the mismatch looks structural rather than cyclical given China now sends twelve times as many graduates into the workforce each year as it did in 2000 — one million becoming twelve — into a services sector that still absorbs under half of them. The country also has about 240 million flexible workers, nearly one third of its labour force, yet heavy investment in AI, robotics, drones and autonomous driving are starting to squeeze these jobs.

A public that can read a private wound as a national verdict needs two things working at once: a number it can check its own life against, and a room where someone else's version of that life gets dramatised and watched together. Call them the epistemic channel and the ritual one. The first hardly needed the suppression it eventually got — national success had already migrated to metrics that no worker could check his own life against to begin with. The second took more effort, because the ecosystem behind it was real, and had to be built before it could be dismantled.

Li Xianting had already attempted to build an ecosystem when, in 1995, he led artists displaced from the demolished Yuanmingyuan commune, in Beijing's northwest, to resettle in the village of Songzhuang, out on the city's eastern edge. By then, however, the old model had already failed on its own terms. Two years earlier, the colony had begun buckling under its own visibility as press coverage and gallery interest converted a freewheeling commune into something more self-conscious; Zhang Jiarui's documentary Seeking Dreams on the Verge (1993) caught the artists mid-transformation.

Fanhall Films, founded in Li's house in 2001 by Zhu Rikun, ran weekly screenings, a DVD distribution line, a bookstore, and a major collection of independent Chinese cinema — the apparatus of a national film culture in miniature. The Li Xianting Film Fund, formalised in 2006, hosted the Beijing Independent Film Festival from 2004 and the documentary festival DOChina alongside it, and in 2008 opened an unaccredited film school.

Elsewhere, Nanjing's China Independent Film Festival grew from 18 films in 2003 to 33 across three venues by 2006; Kunming's Yunnan Multi-Culture Visual Festival, also founded in 2003, made a third node. In his 2022 State of Cinema address for the film journal Sabzian, Wang Bing credited this network — Yunfest, CIFF, BIFF — with "a positive role in the development and popularization of Chinese independent films." West of the Tracks reached Chinese audiences anyway, the way most independent work did that decade (i.e. festival screenings and eventually pirated DVDs).

Then, in 2012, authorities cut BIFF's electricity on its opening night and leaned on the artistic director Wang Hongwei. A year later they set a number, demanding that no screening could show a film to more than two people at once. Two, not three — three would have counted as an "assembly." In 2014, they detained the organisers and forced them to sign their own cancellation letter, a nice bureaucratic touch that made the victims co-author their own erasure, then cut the power a second time, barricaded the rooms, and confiscated the archive Li Xianting had spent over a decade building.

Yunfest closed in 2013. Nanjing's CIFF was shut down 48 hours before its ninth edition was due to open in 2012, despite having scaled to seven screening rooms across three cinemas. It scattered across three cities the following year because no single site could be relied upon to survive the week, then dissolved itself in 2020 with its organisers publicly stating that an independent spirit was no longer something a Chinese film festival could organisationally sustain.

The signs weren't hard to read. Centralisation was coming for everyone next. The authorised Beijing International Film Festival had been founded in 2011, one year before the electricity at Songzhuang first went dark. By its fourteenth edition in 2024 it had drawn more than 1,500 entries and screened over 240 films across 27 venues. It was the same city, inside an overlapping decade, with nearly the same three words in its name, like a landlord evicting a tenant and naming the rebuilt condominium after them.

Some rooms survived as long as they signed up to new terms. Jia Zhangke founded the Pingyao International Film Festival in 2017 with the veteran programmer Marco Müller — the first festival in Chinese history approved by the authorities but privately operated, built to give young filmmakers licensed room to manoeuvre. FIRST, based in Xining, runs a parallel operation within the same regulated system. Running on the logic of other industries that learned how to survive, these secure local municipal support and operate within official regulatory frameworks (clearing censorship hoops in advance rather than fighting battles against authorities).

What that license actually buys gets tested four different ways: by commercial success, institutional embeddedness, festival prestige converted into domestic backing, and by simply never having left the system to begin with.

Li Ruijun's Return to Dust (2022) tested the first, and revealed the limits set from deep inside the licensed system. An unsentimental arranged-marriage story from rural Gansu, pairing Hai Qing with the untrained local farmer Wu Renlin and a largely non-professional cast, the film was submitted, approved and released through ordinary channels. It became a big hit — roughly 100 million yuan from a 2 million yuan budget — before being pulled from every cinema and streaming platform on 26 September, three weeks ahead of the Party's 20th National Congress, with no official reason given.

While Li Ruijun learned this after his film had already found an audience, Zhang Yimou learned it abroad without ever having gained a viewer. By 2008 he had gone from chronicling the national myth to choreographing it outright, directing the Beijing Olympics 2008 opening ceremony, which is about as embedded as a Chinese director gets. Even so, his Cultural Revolution drama One Second was pulled from Berlinale's official competition in February 2019, days before its premiere, for what the industry calls "technical reasons." It took a year to clear censors and reach domestic release, one minute shorter than the version due in Berlin.

Bi Gan found a homecoming that Wang Bing's foreign prestige never opened. A poet before he became a director, Bi made his debut Kaili Blues (2015) with money scraped together from regional and independent sources, production stalling more than once for lack of funds. Kaili Blues picked up prizes at Locarno; three years later, its follow-up premiered in Cannes' Un Certain Regard.

By 2021 that standing had become domestic collateral, and Huace Pictures, a mainland studio, attached itself to what became Resurrection. The film premiered in competition at Cannes in May 2025, took the Special Prize, and opened in Chinese cinemas that November, grossing $28 million — a six-part fever dream about a world that has lost the ability to dream, led by Jackson Yee, a mainland pop idol whose casting looks like commercial insurance against exactly the ambiguity the film traffics in.

Guan Hu never needed either conversion because he never left the system to look for one. His 1994 debut, Dirt, documented the same Beijing rock underground that Zhang Yuan's Beijing Bastards had captured a year earlier. Where Zhang stayed unauthorised, Guan paid roughly $2,000 for state studio affiliation before the film was even finished. Thirty years later, The Eight Hundred (2020) — a $461 million war epic glorifying a dignified retreat in Shanghai, think of it as a Chinese Dunkirk — and Black Dog (2024), a Cannes prize-winner, sit four years apart in the same filmography.

Meanwhile, a decade and a half after Tiexi, Wang Bing returned to the factory floor. Between 2014 and 2019, while the authorities raided Guangdong's Panyu labour centres and the surviving independent network slowly dissolved, he lived among garment workers in Zhili, Zhejiang, filming for five years. The resulting trilogy Youth, split into Spring, Hard Times and Home Coming, runs to nearly 10 hours across three films. The first premiered at Cannes in 2023; the other two followed at Locarno and Venice in 2024, and all three received commercial distribution only outside China.

Wang Bing's access to sensitive parts of China's working and domestic lives barely changed between the two projects, but everything around it did. A screening room in Songzhuang, a catalogue entry in Nanjing, a course at the Li Xianting Film School the following spring (the improvised networks, precarious but real, that ensured footage like his could still reach a Chinese public through something other than a pirated disc) all fell by the wayside. Today, Pingyao and FIRST develop young filmmakers within a licensed ecology, and neither can screen Youth.

Exile did not place the films beyond Beijing, either. In November 2025, Zhu Rikun — the founder of Fanhall Films, which had helped build the Songzhuang network from 2001 — cancelled the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival in New York after 80 percent of its scheduled screenings were withdrawn. Directors based in China withdrew, usually citing "personal reasons" i.e. those abroad said their families back home had been contacted. Zhu told the media that a colleague at his Beijing studio had been taken away for questioning and warned off further contact with him.

What survives of the old network has gone into exile along with the footage. In 2023, Newcastle University launched the Chinese Independent Film Archive involving more than 900 independent films and oral-history interviews with around 170 filmmakers, one of the world's largest publicly accessible archives of its kind. It grew out of a tenth-anniversary event for CIFF organised in Newcastle in 2014 by the scholar Sabrina Qiong Yu, the same year BIFF was being padlocked in Beijing. On the wall of the archive's office hangs a map of China, annotated by hand, marking the cities that once sustained China's independent festival network.

There was a third channel neither Beijing nor its critics seem to have built anything to close. Tangping needed no festival to screen or bureau to publish it. Read closely, it's essentially an audit, a distributed, informal check on whether the rhetoric of striving is matched by the arithmetic of reward.

And the audit has spread at a time when Beijing's control of what audiences has become almost absolute. What plays now speaks the rejuvenation story more fluently and frequently, which means the ritual channel is open almost entirely on the state's own terms. Yet a full room is not the same thing as a persuaded public, and when the only answer to anything is moar rejuvenation, tangping marks an attempt to disoblige, to defer answering at all.