This year, the Golden Rooster Film Academy will hold five events, including a masterclass by Ildikó Enyedi, with an expanded lineup of guests and topics. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi will bring her new film Silent Friend to the Golden Rooster and hold a conversation with Peking University professor Dai Jinhua about her career in cinema. Japanese film producer Genki Kawamura will come to the Golden Rooster Film Academy with Exit 8, his latest film as director, to talk about how he built billion-scale IP such as Your Name. and Weathering with You.

The Golden Rooster Film Academy will also hold three sessions on different themes: the conversation “Pixels and Poetry: Artistic Conception in Animated Film”, a mentor session of the Youth Short Film Season, and a conversation on XR filmmaking. They will bring together experienced industry professionals, working filmmakers and university experts to share knowledge and views on cinema.

The 2025 Golden Rooster Film Academy schedule is as follows:

Ildikó Enyedi is a Hungarian director and screenwriter. Her first feature, My 20th Century, won the Caméra d’Or at the 42nd Cannes Film Festival. In 2017 her film On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, and it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards in 2018. In 2025 her latest film, Silent Friend, was selected for the main competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival and was well received after its premiere.

Enyedi’s work shows a strong female perspective and subtle, deep storytelling. She often breaks through the boundaries of reality, moving freely between the real and the imagined to examine the self. Her film career of more than 40 years, her collaboration with Tony Leung Chiu-wai and her experience of making films across regions and languages give her a distinctive perspective. At this event, Enyedi will discuss cinema and its times with Dai Jinhua, Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University and Director of its Film and Culture Research Center.

Genki Kawamura is a Japanese film producer, director and novelist. He has produced many well-known films, including Your Name., Weathering with You, Suzume and Monster. Exit 8, which he directed, was selected for the Midnight Screenings at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

This will be Kawamura’s first talk on his creative work in China. Drawing on several successful works, he will discuss creating IP across media and taking local stories to a global audience, and look at how IP moves between literature, film and animation and takes new form in each. The session offers a creative method and ideas on the content life cycle for filmmakers working in an industry undergoing upgrading.

Chinese animated films performed well this year. Their success comes both from reaching audiences emotionally and from an artistic conception rooted in tradition. The Golden Rooster Film Academy will invite three working directors to a conversation titled “Pixels and Poetry: Artistic Conception in Animated Film”. The three guests draw on traditional culture and rebuild that conception in different media. The conversation will look at how to preserve and renew the lasting beauty of Chinese aesthetics in a world built from digital pixels, covering both craft and the future of aesthetics.

With the arrival of XR (Extended Reality) technology, audiences no longer only watch a film; they “step into” it. When viewers can be inside the space of a film, space is no longer only the setting of the story but becomes its main storyteller. How filmmakers handle space and how stories can reach audiences in new ways will be explored in this Golden Rooster Film Academy conversation on XR filmmaking, through keynote speeches and a roundtable.

A short film is often a director’s entry into a career. The distance between a short and a feature is more than two hours of running time. How can young directors bridge the creative gap from short to feature film and complete a real “evolution”? This session invites Mak Kai-kwong and Hsieh Pei-ju, members of the final jury of the 6th Golden Rooster Cross-Strait, Hong Kong & Macao Youth Short Film Season, and Yuan Yuan, a member of its second-round jury, to share their practical experience in full.