Private Waves

This interview was conducted by Selena Wang and Christina Jiang. Panning from a tour guide testing his microphone, to tourists deciding on a cafe, to a camera operator hurriedly scouting for locations, this comedic single-take filmed from a rooftop in Kowloon City, Hong Kong, moves between rehearsed, reenacted, real, and all the way back again. Who’s watching who, and if everyone is both watching and performing, who gets to frame the truth?

Synopsis An influencer’s prank went terribly out of hand, turning a fake murder into a real mystery. Blackmailing, alien encounters, everything points to an unsolved child disappearance case 25 years ago.

Stuart Forbes (付博文) is a British actor who has lived and worked in China for over a decade, with a career spanning across TV, film, social media, and short-from vertical dramas. This remote interview took place on an early evening in Shenzhen when, despite getting stuck in traffic and caught in the rain, he ducked into a tea bar to take this call over a cold jasmine tea. When did you start acting, and how did you know it was what you wanted to do?

Syon Peng is a New York-based film curator, director, and founder of Over The Wild. Raised in Shenzhen, she later moved to New York. By the age of twenty-one, she had travelled across all seven continents, and has since visited more than seventy countries. Living across different cultures has led her to think increasingly about one question: how does a film leave the hands of its creator, travel across languages, cities, and spaces, and ultimately find its audience.

What began as a casual recording of a family disagreement gradually evolved into one of the most intimate documentaries in recent Chinese independent cinema. In Confessions of a Mole, director Tan Mo turns the camera on herself and her parents, using a seemingly trivial dispute over a facial mole to unravel generations of love, sacrifice, and emotional inheritance.

Infanticide, directed by London-based Chinese filmmaker Veronica Wang Jingyi, follows a queer filmmaker who returns to her hometown of Hangzhou with a screenplay, casting her divorced parents in scenes drawn from their real-life conflicts. The film was selected for the “First Frame” section at the FIRST International Film Festival 2026, a programme dedicated to foregrounding women’s experiences and representations on screen.

Inspired by a real-life murder involving a Chinese woman studying overseas, New Zealand-based director Cui Mingjian’s short film explores the psychological aftermath of an intimate crime through the friendship between two women living next door to one another, rather than reconstructing the case as a conventional thriller. Developed through Jane Campion’s “A Wave in the Ocean” programme in New Zealand, the 15-minute film premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.

Now in its sixth edition, “First Frame”, FIRST International Film Festival’s section dedicated to women’s cinema, continues to place female experiences and screen representation at the centre of its programme. Across four feature films and ten shorts, this year’s selection explored not only how women are seen and understood, but how cinema itself can become a space for rewriting women’s stories with greater complexity, intimacy and formal ambition.

Premiered at the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, in the section La Cinef, Will It Rain Again Today is Wong Chau-Hong’s exploration of the status of immigrants living in Japan. Inspired by his own experiences, the short captures a delicate undercurrent of emotional intimacy, intertwined with moments of awkward and understated humour. Interviewed by Selena Wang, Lou Cai Why did you decide to move to Japan to study filmmaking?

Premiered at the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, in the section La Cinef, Will It Rain Again Today is Wong Chau-Hong’s exploration of the status of immigrants living in Japan. Inspired by his own experiences, the short captures a delicate undercurrent of emotional intimacy, intertwined with moments of awkward and understated humour. Interviewed by Selena Wang, Lou Cai Why did you decide to move to Japan to study filmmaking?