Qiu Jiongjiong’s ‘Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting’ Lands Tokyo Competition Slot
- The Scoop: Qiu Jiongjiong’s Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting will world-premiere in the main Competition at the 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival.
- Production Scale: The 135-minute feature was shot entirely inside a hand-painted studio, staging four feasts across four millennia drawn from Sichuan folklore.
- Talent & Sales: Lee Kang-sheng, Wang Hi and Xue Xuchun lead the cast, with Parallax Films handling international sales on the Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar co-production.
- Industry Stakes: The slot hands Qiu, whose A New Old Play took a jury prize at Locarno in 2021, a major festival launch pad for global arthouse buyers.
Qiu Jiongjiong’s Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting has locked a main Competition berth and world premiere at the 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival. The placement plants the Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar co-production at the center of Tokyo’s 15-title Competition lineup.
Pandemic Memory Becomes a Four-Millennia Banquet
The film’s engine is a hunger for collective ritual that took shape during the pandemic’s enforced isolation. Qiu built the project around four separate feasts spanning four millennia, each chapter filtering eating and shared meals through its own fantastical vocabulary.
Where A New Old Play tracked a single life, this feature spreads sequentially across four eras and four short stories. The feasts, per the official project description, “bring the living and the dead, gods and ghosts, to the same table.”
Qiu wrote and directed, and also carries production designer and co-editor credits. That stacked authorship signals a filmmaker treating the frame as a constructed artifact rather than a captured document.
Hand-Painted Walls Over Location Logistics
The entire 135-minute feature was shot inside a hand-painted studio. Qiu is betting that fabricated, painterly space can carry more theatrical weight than any real-world location could.
It is a deliberate inversion of the industry’s current appetite for practical, on-location spectacle, the kind of physical production push traced across our recent war-film releases. Qiu’s method is the opposite: total control of light, texture and horizon inside a controlled stage.
Lee Kang-sheng, Wang Hi and Xue Xuchun anchor the cast. Lee’s presence in particular gives the ensemble an arthouse pedigree that will register instantly with festival programmers and specialty distributors.
Tokyo Slot as Sales Leverage, Not Box-Office Math
Parallax Films is steering international sales, and Tokyo’s Competition berth functions as the film’s commercial launch pad. Qiu arrives with festival capital already banked: A New Old Play won a jury prize at Locarno in 2021.
That track record matters for a title with no conventional star-driven opening weekend ahead of it. Buyers at Tokyo will be pricing a filmmaker with proven jury appeal and a distinctive visual signature, not a franchise asset.
No theatrical or streaming window has been set, leaving the festival circuit to do the early commercial work. Every Competition screening becomes a buyer-facing pitch, tracked across our trade entertainment wire as the fall slate firms up.
For Qiu, the stakes are straightforward: a strong Tokyo reception converts into distribution deals across Europe and North America, where hand-crafted auteur fantasy still commands a loyal specialty audience. A soft reception leaves a five-territory co-production hunting for a theatrical foothold.