The Alula Film Festival, once known as the D.C. Chinese Film Festival, has now fully settled into its new Los Angeles home. From October 16th to the 19th, the event will take over The Culver City Theater, presenting a curated selection of independent, auteur-driven films from across the Chinese-speaking world.
This year’s program centers on the theme “In the Making,” a fitting phrase for a festival that prioritizes what is fresh and evolving in cinema. The idea is to remind audiences that these films are not just final products, but rather moments in an ongoing artistic development, full of risk and personal exploration.
Festival Director Shiyu Wang points out that the collection gathers works that capture lives caught between memory, ambition, and vast change. You’ll see intimate family portraits next to grander observations of displacement and fragile community ties.
The Essential Role of Independent Chinese Cinema
Why does this particular focus on Chinese-language cinema matter right now? Because independent film has long served as a vital, often subversive, mirror to a rapidly changing society—a society that contains a quarter of the world’s population. It is a necessary counterpoint to commercial filmmaking.
Filmmakers from this region—including the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diaspora—have consistently produced some of the most formally ambitious and politically perceptive movies of the last few decades. The works of the Fifth, Sixth, and Taiwanese New Waves permanently changed how we think about world film.
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The films selected for Alula, especially those from new directors, continue this crucial legacy. They offer layered, personal views that reach past the familiar headlines, connecting you to human experiences you might otherwise never encounter. This cultural expression is simply too important to overlook.
The festival puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to new talent. Six of the eight feature-length films in the main competition are directorial debuts. That statistic alone tells you the story of a scene bursting with vitality.
Honoring the Past, Championing the Future
The programming this year manages to look forward while giving serious deference to those who paved the way. The Spotlight Screenings section is a masterclass in film history.
Los Angeles audiences will get the North American Premiere of the 4K restored version of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness from 1989. The film, starring Tony Leung, is a monumental work of post-war Taiwanese cinema. Also premiering in the U.S. is the 4K restored Green Snake (1993), a fantasy spectacle directed by Tsui Hark.
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The program also includes a major event: a marathon screening of Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, his nine-hour document of industrial decay in China. Wang Bing is expected to be there, too. This kind of programming brings genuine weight to the event.
As for the competition, the selection is expansive. The four feature documentaries, for instance, focus heavily on individual experiences and family life, reflecting a broader social turn toward introversion in the post-pandemic era. Titles like YANG Lizhu’s Never Too Late and JI Qiuyu’s The Homeless promise intimate access to lives seldom seen on screen.
Look to the feature films for geographic scope, too. Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep With Your Eyes Open takes us to a Brazilian coastal city where a traveler and a Chinese migrant worker cross paths. This isn’t just cinema from a single place; it’s a global conversation.
Finally, the festival’s commitment to varied voices is visible in its statistics: a solid forty percent of the selected directors are women
How to Attend
The 2025 Alula Film Festival runs from October 16th to the 19th at The Culver City Theater.
If you want to catch these vital works, tickets go on sale soon, on September 25, 2025. A Festival Pass costs $60 and gets you into all ten competition screenings. Individual tickets are priced simply: $12 for competition films and $15 for spotlight features.
You can purchase them directly through The Culver City Theater’s official website. Go find a few new favorite directors.
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