Serious fun

This year's Vision Youth Awards honor short films and documentaries on important topics made by Chinese students. Xu Fan reports.

A man who is in his 50s and has cancer uses the last three months of his life to prepare his wife for his approaching death.

This is the gist of a 29-minute film, titled Before We Part, which is based on the real-life story of Han Jiawen's grandparents. Han is about to complete his degree in direction from Shanghai Theater Academy.

Earlier this month, the film won the best picture prize of the Vision Youth Awards 2017. The annual event is jointly held by China Association of Higher Education and the Communication University of China, encouraging college students to share their views of life and the world through cinema.

Eight other movies and documentaries also won at the event this year.

Since it was launched in 2003, the event has risen from being a campus activity to a platform for cultural exchanges, says Hu Fang, the head organizer and professor at the university.

The winners, shortlisted from 27 nominees, were selected from 1,810 aspirants from 26 countries, including the United States and Britain.

Quality works from this will be screened in a special section at the Netherlands' Tampere Film Festival, another significant platform for short films.

"This year's participants have scored both in quality and quantity," Hu says.

Shattered, directed by Gao Jianming from Shanghai University's cinema school, won the awards for best director and best gender focus. The 31-minute drama revolves around the struggles for survival of a poor woman whose husband is badly injured in an accident, and they have a son with autism.

While the award-winning films have been made by people in their 20s, around half of the stories are about the elderly.

Go Gentle into That Good Night, coproduced by Liu Min of the Communication University of China and Wu Yawen from the University of Southern California, captures the last days of those living in Beijing Songtang Hospice, the first such service in China to care for terminally ill people. The 22-minute documentary won the award for best editing.

My Grandparents, a 40-minute documentary by Zhou Tianyi from the Communication University of China, records a couple's 50-year married life to give the viewers a glimpse of the changes in China's countryside, and Tableland captures an old farmer's reflections about rapid urbanization. The former film won in the best feature documentary category and the latter got the "work of the year" award.

The awards also had special prizes for even younger contenders.

The best work by a middle school student went to Qingchun de Muyang (The Looks of Puberty) directed by Zhao Shengbo from Hengshui High School in North China's Hebei province, which is known for producing graduates who get top scores in gaokao, the competitive national college entrance examination.

Sa Beining, a celebrity who hosted the event this year, says Zhao's win shows Chinese teenagers' pursuit of artistic dreams while preparing for tough examinations.

Other works that won awards this year are Salvation, Life Journey and The Hero with a Single Leg for cinematography, screenplay and short documentary, respectively.

"From my viewpoint, many awarded films have a good chance also at international festivals," says Jukka-Pekka Laakso, a member of the jury and director of the Tampere Film Festival.

"I was very happy with the decision (of the awards), as it reflected the variety in Chinese filmmaking," he says, adding that for someone like him, with little knowledge of Chinese language, he still got a sense from the scripts.

"I can see the potential in China's film and documentary industries. Some of the movies helped me to learn more about China," says Laakso.

Wang Jiyan, the jury president and executive director of Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based broadcaster, echoes the view.

He praises the diversity of the themes the films cover, ranging from the attacks on Chongqing by the invading Japanese troops to the aging problem in modern China.

Wang says that four of China's top academic institutes - Tsinghua University, Peking University, Renmin University of China and Beijing Normal University - should have also featured in the awards list.

Highlights of Vision Youth Awards 2017 included screening on campuses and a section celebrating 20 years of Hong Kong's return to China. Up to 113 Chinese colleges simultaneously screened all winning films and a few of the nominees over June 5-8.

Ten students of the Communication University of China teamed up with students from Hong Kong to produce the short film Hong Kong in the Eyes of College Students, interviewing celebrities such as Kenneth Fok, one of the city's top entrepreneurs.

Contact the writer at xufan@chinadaily.com.cn