The Maritime Guangdong Young Director Support Program (hereinafter referred to as the Maritime Guangdong Program) is a large-scale talent support activity initiated and organized by the Yangcheng Evening News Group in 2023, aimed at discovering, incubating, selecting, and cultivating outstanding young directors from China and abroad.
Based in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), the program seeks to identify emerging voices in the field of image creation globally, supporting them in exploring various types of short films, including drama, documentaries, and animation. The goal is to break new ground in the imagination of future Chinese visual culture, while allowing the world to rediscover China through the lens of film.
As we enter a period of reassessment for the grand narrative of globalization, the coordinate system of world cinema is undergoing a structural realignment. The old center of gravity is shifting, and voices from the margins are now being heard. The most vital moving-image practices are emerging from the cracks of grand narratives, returning to real people, real places, and lived historical experience.
In 2026, the Maritime Guangdong Young Director Support Program (Maritime Guangdong Program), under the theme "South of Lingnan," will continue to focus on short-film creation, launching an intellectual and aesthetic exploration that takes cross-regional storytelling as its method.
"South of Lingnan," first and foremost, is a recalibration of cinematic perspective. For a long time, the dominant routes of discussion in world cinema have been shaped by Euro-American cinema histories and industrial systems, while Asian cinema, especially Southeast Asian cinema, has often been positioned as a "regional genre" or a "cultural specimen." However, since the turn of the millennium, a steady stream of filmmakers from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia with their strong authorial voices and place-based methodologies has risen to prominence on the international film festivals. Together, they have formed a genealogy of southern cinema that diverges from mainstream industrial logic, known for low-budget production, a strong sense of realism, and hybrid genres. They are particularly active in shorts and mid-length films, becoming a crucial source for the renewal of contemporary cinematic language.
Lingnan is precisely the key node through which Chinese cinema can forge a tangible linkage with this southern cinema. As one of the earliest regions in Chinese history to be shaped by maritime civilization and cross-cultural exchange, Lingnan not only connects to Southeast Asia geographically, but also resonates with it in cultural genes, social structures, and aesthetic orientations. Through co-production mechanisms, festival exchanges, and the mobility of creators, interactions between Chinese and Southeast Asian cinema in recent years have shifted beyond subject matter and are increasingly entering a space of mutual learning in cinematic methods and narrative ethics.
The 2026 Maritime Guangdong Program treats "Lingnan" as a cinematic method—a creative logic that emphasizes local observation, a tactile sense of reality, and narrative flexibility. We attend to lived experience in motion: migration, labor, shifting family structures, the translation of faith and emotion and the like. These themes that recur across images from Southeast Asia and southern China together trace a hidden yet unmistakable southern cinematic thread.
In this context, the short film offers an irreplaceable space for experimentation. It requires filmmakers to complete a full narrative construction and make firm aesthetic judgments within a limited runtime, demanding the precision of expression and the density of ideas, rather than the scale of production. It is in short films that many major contemporary directors first crystallized their style, and it is also here that cross-regional exchanges of storytelling and aesthetics can unfold in freer and more vivid ways.
The Maritime Guangdong Program will place particular support behind short-film works with a clear cinematic consciousness, encouraging filmmakers to break new ground in genre exploration and audiovisual language. Through creative supports, training camps, mentorship programs, and international festival promotions, the Maritime Guangdong Program will help short-film works integrate into a more complete film ecosystem, so they exist not merely as "image projects," but as works to be watched, discussed, and written about.
Ultimately, what we hope to present is not an isolated collection of works, but a mutually resonant "short film anthology", one that collectively sketches a portrait of the southern world in motion, and offers Chinese-language cinema a reference point for re-situating itself.
In 2026, let us set out from Lingnan, focus on the south of Lingnan, and reimagine how world cinema might connect on the scale of the short film.
