Pisa Chinese Film Festival 2026

Category:

ENTERTAINMENT

Place:

Parco delle Concette

Start date:

22 Jun 2026

End date:

25 Jun 2026

The 15° Pisa Chinese Film Festival, organized by the Confucius Institute at the Santa Ana Institute for Advanced Studies in Pisa in collaboration with the Udine Far East Film Festival and the Pisa Armory, will return to the Parc de la Concorde in Paris from Monday, June 22 to Thursday, June 25, 2026. Four outdoor evenings were dedicated to contemporary Chinese films, all free, in the original language with Italian subtitles, entitled "Ridere regiovanesce", which evokes the famous proverb "A smile, a smile, ten years of rejuvenation"“. Four films, including latest-generation hits and rediscovered classics, to learn about some of the incarnations of Chinese comedy.

After fantasy and science fiction in 2023, thrillers, neo-noir, and crime films in 2024, and a genre fusion survey in 2025, the 15° festival has chosen to challenge another great tradition of Chinese cinema, perhaps the least frequented by Western audiences: comedy. On the one hand, the comedy genre represents one of the main commercial drivers of the box office in the People's Republic of China and, on the other, it defines a sharp and extremely popular language for presenting many themes of contemporary society: family relationships, economic ambitions, relationships with childhood and adolescence, digital images and the redefinition of life models.

From the sentimental decline of Jia Ling's "Hello, Mom," to the animated blockbuster "Nifa 2," one of the biggest commercial successes in Chinese cinema history, to the social satire of Yan Fei and Peng Damo's "The Successor," and finally to the rediscovery of Zhang Yimou's satire and experimentation in the 1997 urban comedy "Keep Calm," it remains one of his lesser-known and most surprising films.

PROGRAM