The 2026 China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival opened in Xiamen on Friday, according to 中国新闻网. The five-day event packs more than 60 activities into six main categories, spanning major ceremonies, film screenings and academic forums.
The festival program includes the Golden Rooster Chinese-language Film Exhibition, the Golden Rooster International Film Exhibition, the Golden Rooster Film Forum, the Golden Rooster Cross-Strait and Hong Kong-Macau Youth Short Film Season, and a special promotional event for Taiwanese films, 中国新闻网 reports.
Why it matters
The festival's centerpiece is the 39th China Film Golden Rooster Awards, whose winners will be revealed at a ceremony on the evening of November 10. The nominations, released earlier, put seven films in contention for Best Feature Film: Wan Tong Shu, The Aviator, Nanjing Photo Studio, A Love Letter to Grandma, Classified File, Deafening and Blades of the Desert Wind.
The acting races are equally closely watched. Wu Lei, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Jiang Long, Jiang Qiming and Tan Jianci are nominated for Best Actor, while Li Sitong, Song Jia, Zhang Zifeng, Chen Lijun and Gao Ye are up for Best Actress.
The festival also serves as a showcase for Xiamen itself. According to 凤凰网, since the Golden Rooster Awards settled in the city, Xiamen has been moving from its reputation as a natural filming backdrop toward becoming a base for high-quality film production.
Director recounts how his grandmother's dialect became "movie talk"
One of the opening ceremony's most personal moments came from director Lan Hongchun, whose film A Love Letter to Grandma has been screening at home and abroad and carries six nominations at this year's Golden Rooster Awards, 中国新闻网 reports.
Lan told the audience that his connection to cinema began in childhood, in the days he spent living with his grandmother. She could not understand the Mandarin dialogue in the films they watched, he recalled, and described the language on screen as "movie talk."
Thirty years later, Lan said, he has made three films in the Chaoshan dialect — and has finally turned his grandmother's hometown speech into that "movie talk."
He described the most valuable and moving core of filmmaking as something rooted in a person's own lived experience and in the ground beneath their feet. That rooted, heartfelt reality, he said, has filled his creative work and sustained a decade of commitment to telling stories from his home region, keeping him clear about where his work comes from and whom he makes it for.
A festival built around screenings and exchange
Beyond the awards race, the festival's six activity categories give the program a broad reach. The twin exhibition strands — one for Chinese-language cinema and one international — run alongside the film forum and the youth short film season, which is open to young filmmakers from the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. A dedicated Taiwanese film promotional session rounds out the cross-strait programming.
The opening ceremony itself was framed around light and shadow returning to the coastal city, with coverage from 中华网 describing the evening as one in which cinema lit up Xiamen.
For the films in competition, the coming days are the final stretch. The Best Feature Film field mixes literary adaptation, period drama and personal documentary-style storytelling, while the acting categories pair established stars with newer names.
What to watch: the awards ceremony on the evening of November 10, when the 39th Golden Rooster winners are announced and the festival's five-day run comes to a close.
