Editor's note: Wang Yan, a special commentator  for CGTN, is a senior expert from Beijing Foreign Studies University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The 28th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), which opened on June 12, marks a significant shift in the global cultural landscape. This year, the festival's international dimension has been notably upgraded: Its map of cooperation has expanded beyond the traditional Euro-American industrial axis toward the Middle East, Latin America and Africa – the Global South, home to the majority of the world's population.

The festival received approximately 4,100 film submissions from 125 countries and regions, with world or international premieres accounting for 82% of eligible entries. There has been a significant surge in entries from the Americas and Africa, with submissions from Ghana and Mozambique for the first time.

The 12 finalists in the main competition are from 34 countries and regions, with Jordan and Saudi Arabia making their debut in the "Asian New Talent" category and Morocco returning to the category after 27 years.

This is not merely a geographic expansion. It signals a structural transformation in how cultural exchange is organized and who gets to shape the narratives that define our times.

The engine driving this transformation is the Belt and Road Film Festival Alliance, initiated by SIFF in 2018. What began with 31 institutions from 29 countries has now expanded to 57 member institutions across 50 nations, encompassing festivals from Russia to Colombia, Hungary to Singapore.

The numbers speak for themselves. By 2024, the alliance had screened 129 films from Belt and Road partner countries, while 54 Chinese films traveled to member nations. Among the latter, 10 found their way into the main competition sections of international festivals, and three walked away with major awards. This is not cultural diplomacy on paper; it is cinema finding its audience and audiences finding one another.

Mutual engagement and resonance

The real promise of this model, however, lies not in numbers but in bilateral connections that reflect genuine mutual engagement. Take Egypt, for example. In November 2025, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of Sino-Egyptian diplomatic relations, the Chinese Film Week opened in Cairo's Zamalek Cinema, screening six Chinese titles. The event drew nearly 400 Egyptian film professionals and audiences, with Egyptian National Film Center Director Ahmed Saleh hailing it as a cornerstone of bilateral cultural exchange.

What made the event remarkable was the reciprocity. Earlier that year, the Chinese film The Botanist, a teen Kazakh boy's coming-of-age story set in Xinjiang Uygur Region, and its director Jing Yi had already won accolades at the Cairo International Film Festival, signaling that the dialogue is flowing both ways.

Similarly, in Brazil – where 2026 is designated as the China-Brazil Year of Culture – the China-Shanghai Film Week in Sao Paulo featured five critically acclaimed Chinese films. The opening entry, Her Story, a realistic narrative about a single mother navigating romance, career, and parenting directed by young filmmaker Shao Yihui, received a standing ovation, with the local audience particularly impressed by its nuanced portrayal of women in contemporary Shanghai.

Now SIFF has returned the favor. The ongoing festival's "Spotlight on Brazil" section showcases contemporary Brazilian animation, documentaries and a restored classic, "Hour of the Star," ensuring that Brazilian audiences in Shanghai feel seen in return.

As Yu Peng, the Chinese Consul General in Sao Paulo, observed, "As important members of the Global South and the largest developing countries in the Eastern and Western hemispheres, we are more likely to find spiritual resonance in each other's film and television works." The phrase "spiritual resonance" captures something essential. South-South film cooperation is about recognizing shared structural experiences such as colonial histories, development challenges and the search for modernity on one's own terms, and giving them cinematic form.

A new cultural logic

The implications extend far beyond the festival circuit. By fostering co-productions and cross-border collaborations, these platforms are creating a new logic for cultural exchange – local and reciprocal. The Belt and Road Film Week's 2025 theme, "Travel with Films," captured this ethos perfectly. Films have become not just art but passports to shared experience, bridges that allow audiences in different parts of China and the world to encounter the same stories.

This is South-South resonance in its most vivid form: A cultural network growing not out of geopolitical calculation but out of a genuine hunger for stories that reflect the full complexity of our shared world.

Beyond state-level commemoration, the most durable impact of these initiatives may lie in their cultivation of young creators. The Belt and Road Film Week includes not only screenings but also themed cultural markets, such as the "Courtesy to Arabia" bazaar, which create spaces for informal encounter and creative cross-pollination. SIFF's Asian New Talent section, chaired this year by Singaporean director Anthony Chen, provides a launchpad for emerging filmmakers from across the Global South.

A new grammar of international communication

Moreover, what SIFF is constructing, incrementally and pragmatically, is a new infrastructure for international cultural communication.

In an era of geopolitical fragmentation and technological disruption, soft power is increasingly measured by the density of cross-border networks. The Belt and Road Film Festival Alliance is becoming precisely such a network – a mesh of institutional relationships that supports co-productions, talent exchange and joint distribution. Its significance lies in the alternative pipelines it is creating for all the countries. The expansion of SIFF's cooperative map is part of a broader trend, namely the diversification of global cultural production.

The 28th SIFF is, in this sense, more than a cinematic event. It is a laboratory for a different kind of globalization, one built on mutual recognition and shared aspiration.

As the lights dim and the screens light up across Shanghai's theaters, what the audiences are witnessing is not just a program of films. They are seeing the contours of a new map taking shape, where the stories of the Global South resonate with one another and where cinema becomes what it has always promised to be – a universal language spoken in many accents.

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