Best LGBT Film
Synopsis
Dudu and Feifei, a same-sex couple who had been living together in Beijing for six years, find themselves confronting long-standing, unresolved tensions on the eve of their trip.
Director Biography – Mengfei Yu
Mengfei Yu was born in Beijing in 1996. In 2023, she began her undergraduate studies in Film Production at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Before formally training as a filmmaker, she spent a year studying Illustration and Photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the United States, where she continued to create work across both mediums.
Her debut short film, Auntie, earned a Special Mention Award in the Short Film category at the 12th Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival in India and was officially selected for the 11th Madrid International Film Festival’s International Short Film category, along with three other festivals. As the producer and a key creative collaborator on the short film Conversion, she saw the work selected for six festivals, including the 2024 Tokyo Lift-Off Film Festival and the 2024 Golden Horse Film Festival.
Yu’s work is deeply rooted in realism, focusing on the intricate dynamics between individuals and society, the self, and others—exploring how these relationships take shape and unfold within physical spaces. Grounded in a realist aesthetic, her films seek to use cinema as a medium to capture complex emotional experiences that intertwine subjective and objective perspectives, creating a strong emotional connection with audiences.
In her writing, Yu often turns her attention to China’s minority groups and middle class, exploring the country’s distinctive social phenomena, the structures that shape them, and the ways individuals strive for self-realisation within these frameworks.
Yu draws significant inspiration from Asian directors such as Lee Chang-dong and Edward Yang, whose works examine East Asian and Chinese societies through rich visual storytelling. Internationally, she looks to the films of the Dardenne brothers and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, building upon their approaches to further investigate cinema’s potential as an expressive and innovative art form.
