FIRST International Film Festival Xining 2024
Held on the high-altitude plateau of Qinghai Province in northwestern Chine, the FIRST International Film Festival Xining is one of the few major Chinese competitive festivals devoted exclusively to debut and early-career filmmakers, positioning itself as a launchpad for voices that have yet to find purchase in the mainstream commercial circuit.
FIRST - an acronym drawn from the English phrase "First Frame" - was established in Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai, to champion independent and art-house cinema made by directors in the earliest stages of their careers. The city sits at roughly 2,300 metres above sea level, and the festival has leaned into its geographic remove from Beijing and Shanghai as a statement of identity: it is deliberately peripheral, deliberately independent, and deliberately interested in the edges of Chinese cinematic culture rather than its centre.
The competition structure at FIRST is built around first and second features. The festival's flagship award is the Best Film prize, while separate categories recognise directing, acting, and documentary work. A jury made up of established filmmakers and critics from across the international film community adjudicates the competition, and the festival has a history of inviting prominent international directors to participate as jury members - a gesture toward its ambition to be seen as a globally relevant event rather than a domestic showcase.
What distinguishes FIRST from other Chinese festivals is its consistent appetite for work that sits outside mainstream genre conventions. Across its history the festival has championed films dealing with rural displacement, ethnic minority experience in western China, queer identity, and structural poverty - subjects that receive limited platform at commercially oriented festivals. The programme regularly includes films that have struggled or failed to obtain standard distribution approval in China, which gives FIRST a reputation as a thermometer for the current temperature of independent Chinese filmmaking.
The festival's documentary section has been particularly robust, regularly programming investigative and observational works that would struggle to find exhibition elsewhere. The documentaire programming draws from both Chinese domestic production and the broader Asian region, with filmmakers from countries including Japon, South Korea, and Iran appearing in competition or sidebar programmes.
FIRST also runs an industry platform designed to connect emerging directors with producers and financiers, and the market component has grown in significance as the festival has matured. Projects pitched at the FIRST industry forum have gone on to receive funding and reach completion at subsequent festivals both inside and outside China.
The location in Xining gives the festival an unusual character. The city is the gateway to Tibet and has a substantial Hui Muslim population alongside its Han majority, and the cultural mix of the region finds its way into the kinds of films that FIRST both attracts and produces - works interested in the western frontier of the country, in landscapes that feel remote from the urban centres that dominate Chinese cinema, and in communities whose stories are underrepresented in national film culture.
Genre and cult cinema are not the primary focus at FIRST, which is oriented more toward social realism and art cinema. That said, the festival's commitment to unconventional filmmakers and its tolerance for formally radical work means that experimental et surreal cinema have found a home in its programme, and directors with roots in independent genre filmmaking have participated both as competitors and as retrospective subjects.
The annual gathering in Xining has earned consistent respect within the Chinese independent film community as a space where work is evaluated on creative terms rather than commercial potential, which in the context of the Chinese film industry represents a meaningful and protected exception.
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