Film history on a large screen
This year’s retrospectives include Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe, with another programme marking British director Ken Loach’s 90th birthday. The selection brings different ideas of screen performance and social observation into the same festival: Wilder’s writing and direction, Monroe’s star presence and Loach’s long engagement with ordinary working lives.
Science fiction has a substantial place too. The announced programme includes classics by Steven Spielberg and the science-fiction animation trilogy of René Laloux, alongside IMAX and Dolby presentations.
A citywide and international programme
Organisers plan more than 420 films and 1,500 screenings. The cinema list spans 47 Shanghai venues, with additional screenings in Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Hefei. This is a distributed cinema season rather than one destination containing the whole event.
The international strands include an Egyptian Film Week marking 70 years of diplomatic relations between China and Egypt, and Focus Brazil within the China–Brazil Year of Culture. Those programmes sit alongside competition films, new work and repertory cinema. A visitor can follow a national cinema or a director without making the competition the whole of the festival.
Programme and tickets
The full schedule is due on 3 June, with Shanghai tickets going on sale through the official Damai platform on 5 June. The extended screening period is 12–28 June; the festival itself closes 21 June. Individual listings determine venue, language, subtitles and session time.
The official SIFF cinema directory is the useful address book: screenings occupy multiple districts, so a film’s theatre matters as much as its date. Do not assume an English-language film, or a film from elsewhere, will carry English subtitles without checking that session.