Shanghai Film Festival: Where Tomorrow’s Classics Meet Cinema Legends

The Shanghai International Film Festival is back, and this year it feels like a giant movie mixtape: world premieres, screen legends, fresh talent, restored classics, sci-fi spectacle and Tony Leung sitting right at the centre of it all.

Now in its 28th edition, SIFF has serious global weight. It is mainland China’s only FIAPF-recognised A-list film festival, and this year’s programme is huge: more than 420 films selected from around 4,100 submissions across 125 countries. That is not a festival dipping a toe into cinema. That is a full-body dive.

For Recce readers, the hook is simple. Shanghai is doing what all great festivals should do. It is not just telling you what is prestigious. It is helping you discover what might be next.

At the top of the bill is Tony Leung Chiu-wai, jury president for the Golden Goblet Awards. Leung is one of those actors who can say more with a glance than most scripts manage in 90 minutes. From In the Mood for Love to Infernal Affairs and Shang-Chi, his career bridges arthouse cool, Asian cinema history and global audience appeal. His presence gives the festival proper star power.

But SIFF is not only looking backwards at legends. One of the most exciting things about this year’s festival is its backing of new filmmakers. The opening film, Afterpiece, comes from first-time director Keane T.K. Wong. That is a bold move for a festival of this scale, and a brilliant one. Instead of playing safe with a guaranteed heavyweight, Shanghai has chosen a debut feature: a moody psychological drama about art, performance and a director trying to reclaim his dignity.

That feels like a statement. New filmmakers need more than applause after they have broken through. They need proper stages before everyone else has noticed them. SIFF seems determined to be one of those stages, with talent programmes designed to support young Chinese-language filmmakers from early development through to industry exposure.

The festival is also casting its net wide. This year’s competition line-up includes films from 34 countries and regions across its sections, including a Moroccan film in the main competition for the first time in 27 years. That is the kind of programming that makes festivals worth following. Not because every film will become a global hit, but because this is where you find the stories your algorithm has not served you yet.

And then, just when you think Shanghai is all about the future, it reminds you the past still has plenty to say.

This year’s retrospectives celebrate Ken Loach as he turns 90, alongside tributes to Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi, French animator René Laloux, and a joint celebration of Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe. That is a proper international film education in one festival programme. Loach brings the grit and humanity of British cinema. Spielberg brings blockbuster imagination. Laloux brings animated strangeness. Wilder and Monroe bring wit, glamour and old Hollywood electricity.

That is the joy of Shanghai this year. It is not choosing between discovery and nostalgia. It is giving audiences both.

SIFF is also leaning into the cinema experience itself, with IMAX, Dolby Vision and 4K restorations. But the smartest point from the festival is that technology alone will not bring audiences back. Better screens and sharper sound are brilliant, but the story still has to land.

That tension runs through the festival. The opening film, Afterpiece, is intimate and human. The closing film, The Decisive Moment, is a Chinese sci-fi thriller about astronauts in peril. One looks inward. One rockets outward. Together, they say a lot about where cinema is right now: caught between the personal and the spectacular, the handmade and the high-tech.

For Recce users, Shanghai is worth watching because it sits at the crossroads of everything we love about film. Stars you know. Filmmakers you do not know yet. Classics worth rediscovering. Future-facing cinema that might shape what we are all watching next.

So keep an eye on the Golden Goblets, but do not stop there. The real joy of SIFF is not only finding out what wins. It is spotting the films, names and stories that might be filling your Recce feed next.