The girl stands before a wall. A projection casts her parents’ wedding video. Standing in the light, the image envelops her. Over the unedited soundtrack, she stares directly into the camera and narrates: This is the 90s when I was born… The road was wide, as if leading to a bright future.Serge Daney, born in 1944 and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, never met his father throughout his life, lost amid the chaos of war. It was only upon watching the documentary Night and Fog that Dardenne recognized his origins in film—the legends surrounding his father. For him, the space between the cinema’s darkness and the screen’s light contained the presence of the absent one; it was here he found the source and meaning of his own existence.
Individual memories are thus frozen in time, while collective narratives are archived through countless such moments.On December 10th, FIRST and its long-term official website partner Feimu conducted their annual handover review. The document concludes with a summary: From 2019 to 2025, six major systems, 29 forms, and 200,000 registered users. Technology evolves, but our founding spirit remains unchanged. A significant portion of the document focuses on the accumulation and analysis of “user assets.”In IT terminology, “user assets” refer to an archivable, retrievable, and scalable repository. Within the film festival context, these are creators, curators, industry partners, media, volunteers, and audiences. Through the lens of time, we call them archives and memories.
What will this memory look like in 2025? It will be Tan Qirong and He Mingying, the two leads from Auntie, stepping away from their domestic work to perform their original songs a cappella at a screening. It will be the mother from New Moon Chapter gazing at her daughter from the audience, waiting and watching. It is the Oscar Cinema manager, exhausted after the festival, waking from a nap and suddenly shedding two tears; it is Linglingling, excited after an award nomination, packing her bags to take a hard-seat train south for further studies, only to turn back home after losing her backpack on the subway… Stories unfold year after year, becoming new memories.
We slip into the screen, confronting the unfamiliar, chaotic destinies of others in the film. We project our hidden thoughts onto the joys and sorrows of the characters, recognizing familiar pain within alien fates. Thus, watching a film becomes an inward journey, allowing us to find a sanctuary for our own selves.Yet, as stories pile up like mountains, freshness grows ever harder to come by.We yearn desperately for groundbreaking masterpieces that shatter conventions. Here, a poem comes to mind: A poet thinks of a word / yet cannot touch it / cannot see it / cannot describe it… but still writes / writes poetry in his kingdom / writes with a child cradled on his lap / writes until night falls / when a thousand demons descend with a roar / demons who will surely drag him to hell / but still writes.
“The work is still rough, still searching for its voice.”
Humanity grows through language’s inquiries and exists through language’s construction. The piles of unfinished drafts and discarded manuscripts are all narrow passages carved out for feelings yet to be articulated with precision. They offer no guarantee that every expression will “stand on the right side.” Yet in an age demanding speed, stance, and position, we must still grant hesitant, uncertain, and ambiguous sentences a little time—to see what shape they might grow into.
Recognition may never be fully attained. Yet it does not prevent us from journeying together, nor from weaving a collective travelogue where we “dream the same dream at the same time.”FIRST also has a wall. Seven rows, thirty-two compartments. Each holds roughly two hundred and sixty file folders. Before complete digitization, works flooding in from around the world are registered, copied, sealed, and archived by curators. Each compartment resembles a Babel-like village.
Each file folder holds a living being and countless coexisting threads of history. They may never be enshrined in the canon, yet opening a hard drive at random might reveal this scene: yesterday, a student felt liberated after reading Socrates’ Apology.And a man like Dardenne, in this footage not shot for him, affirms a presence of self.Tomorrow is January 1, 2026. With Dardenne’s words, I offer this to every living being—
Cinema is a collective endeavor that pitches its tent between loyalty and faith. It need not burn itself too fiercely in loyalty, nor let itself be utterly bewildered by faith.
The 20th FIRST Film Festival Opening Poster
People often describe film history as a path illuminated by light.
Before dawn breaks over the wasteland, the world slides toward mediocrity. Eyes close to the earth’s surface, silent and bright, search for crawling heat sources in deserts, margins, and frigid zones. Until suddenly, they lift their gaze and discover the horizon has been redrawn.
A new chapter is about to begin.
Submissions for the 20th FIRST Film Festival’s Main Competition, FIRST FRAME: Her Frame Competition, and FIRST PIONEER Creative Competition open on January 1, 2026, and close on April 28.
