NewGen Shorts | Burning Longings

Shy and imaginative eight-year-old Xuan struggles to find the perfect outfit for her school's upcoming Children's Day celebration while adjusting to a turbulent home life and an unlikely new friendship at school. CHILDREN’S DAY traces this from the perspective of a child whose wish for a perfect celebration collides with the fractures of family, exposing how even the most innocent hopes are entangled with the weight of expectation and neglect.

ORLO WITH KARMA reframes longing not as a search for validation, but as the affirmation of presence. Its heroine—cycling through the alleyways of Lhasa, hip-hop inflected, agile and uncontainable—embodies a freedom that resists symbolic reduction. She is local yet future-oriented, gendered yet self-defining, existing not as a representation but as a lived force. Her very being unsettles the desire to categorize, reminding us that the most radical longing may lie in simply existing otherwise.

The boy, Li Tairan, stands on the threshold of the adult world in a state of confusion and dilemma. The ashes of his long-dead father, the accident that led to his repetition of Grade 12, his mysterious friend Xiaoyu......the silent boy slowly goes out of the routine, and runs to the field where his father grew according to his memory. Longing turns intimate yet political in LISTEN TO YOUR LOVE FOR ME, where a young gay couple must confront the fault lines of cultural identity and political allegiance within their relationship, proving how personal love is never detached from broader currents of exclusion and ideology.

The boy, Li Tairan, stands on the threshold of the adult world in a state of confusion and dilemma. The ashes of his long-dead father, the accident that led to his repetition of Grade 12, his mysterious friend Xiaoyu...... the silent boy slowly goes out of the routine, and runs to the field where his father grew according to his memory. QUO VADIS then extends this condition into adolescence: caught between the memory of a deceased father, the estrangement from peers, and the uncertain pull of the future, the protagonist’s drifting figure embodies the dissonance of belonging in contemporary China. Here, the desire is not for love or recognition alone, but for a foothold in a shifting landscape of family, city, and destiny.