The Grand Tour · 2026 China Academy of Art (CAA) Graduation Season has come to a successful close. Graduates from 20 academic units responded to the times with art and explored the future through creativity, unfolding a youthful narrative of ideals, journeys, and growth across the city and campus, transforming Hangzhou into an open art venue that gathers intellectual power, creativity, and action.

The China Academy of Art is proud to launch the "Youth Insights" series, which continues to focus on topics such as avant-garde experimentation, humanities and technology, rural academies, A better China, rooted construction, people-centered, poetic cinema, visual sinology, Eastern design, and overseas insights. The series closely follows how young creators measure the world with their footsteps and respond to the times with their works. Between every departure and arrival, we jointly witness the grand explorations and boundless possibilities of a new generation of artists.

Young filmmakers approach "poetic cinema" as a boundary-breaking attitude and claim. Rather than trying to fit film history into a single mold, they recognize a persistent core: even the faintest poetic impulse expands the medium's linguistic and perceptual boundaries. By embracing the dual tensions of this expansion, they allow seemingly contradictory forces to coexist organically. Informed by contemporary film philosophy and ongoing theoretical refinement, their work persistently channels creative energy into conceptual vitality and the development of an auteur cinema rooted in poetic aesthetics.

Home

Director/Artist: Zhang Mingxuan

School of Film, China Academy of Art

Advisor: Zhu Haibei

Medium: Feature Film

Duration: 75 minutes

This feature observes the everyday existence of a rural family in North China following their relocation to a new dwelling. In the texture of mundane routine, the film registers the gradual infirmity of the parental generation, the maturation of their offspring, and the shifting dynamics of the father-son relationship amid a rapidly transforming social landscape. Employing a restrained cinematic vocabulary—both visual and aural—the work attends to the incidental and the inconspicuous within the domestic sphere, recording the ongoing process of urbanization as it impinges upon rural familial life. Through meticulous attention to domestic minutiae and naturalistic dialect dialogue, it traces the tacit, awkward, yet profoundly sincere affective currents that flow between generations. Resolutely anti-melodramatic, the film opts for a detached observational register over sentimental heightening. In the seemingly trivial succession of removals, altercations, and reunions, it accumulates a palpable sedimentation of time, ultimately gesturing toward that which remains unspeakable yet omnipresent in the Chinese familial imaginary: love, obligation, and the quiet persistence of care.

Advisor's Message

In today's world, where AI and short videos saturate our daily lives, people have grown accustomed to consuming a constant barrage of information without ever pausing to truly look. The creator of this work was also, in the early stages of production, influenced by certain "trends." However, after a conversation with their advisor, they turned their gaze back to their hometown—to the land of China that had nurtured them—and looked upon it once more with profound affection. This film employs a pseudo-documentary cinematic language to outline the transformation of an ordinary rural family in North China. Its predominantly long-take aesthetic responds to the classical film theory that has informed the author's research. The film focuses on the emotional bonds and conflicts within a rural family, using static camera positions to invite the audience into the cinematic space of this household. The camera calmly narrates the warmth and friction of familial affection, while simultaneously reminding viewers to observe the psychological shifts experienced by each family member in the wake of rural urbanization.

The dialogue and performances carry a certain stylized quality, perhaps bearing traces of de-dramatization—yet the author's direct confrontation with the limitations of their own life experience also constitutes a form of truth. The participation of the author's own family members as performers brings with it the genuine expectations and warmth of the parental generation. The fiction of the film originates in reality; the author attempts to find a subtle balance between the fictional and the non-fictional. The transitions from black-and-white to color seem to whisper, almost inadvertently, a quiet truth: "The more ubiquitous AI becomes, the more precious the real becomes."

Young creators can easily lose their way in imitation. Western "reference points" and value systems are not necessities for the cultural expression of Chinese cinema. To divorce art from its native cultural soil is to leave it but an empty shell. In this 75-minute graduation work, a young, reserved author has achieved a form of "disenchantment and self-assurance," earnestly and seriously presenting their lived experience and revealing a glimpse of the human strength embedded in the ordinary details of Chinese life.

Zhang Mingxuan

Class Monitor, Radio and Television Directing Program, Class of 2022

Recipient of the University Single Scholarship for three consecutive academic years (2022–2023, 2023–2024, 2024–2025)

Named Outstanding Student Cadre in 2023

In 2026, served as lead creator of the graduation film Home, which was awarded:

Gold Award, 2026 Graduation Creation and Lin Fengmian Creation Award

Best Picture and Best Editing, Film School "Academy Awards"