Festival organizers who don't want to be talked about are hard to find! Yet that's the case for the volunteers who organize the Allers-Retours Festival, an event designed to showcase Chinese auteur cinema, whose sixth edition is taking place in Paris, from February 2 to 11, and, for the second year in a row in Lyon, from February 14 to 17.

Why keep it a secret? Was the festival a failure? Quite the contrary. The screenings at the Musée Guimet in Paris on Friday, February 2 and Sunday, February 4 were sold out. Throughout the week, films shown in other cinemas in the capital, such as the Studio des Ursulines, were also a great success. But the young members of the Chinese diaspora are convinced that it's in their best interest to remain "modest and discreet," particularly in the eyes of the Chinese authorities, who are increasingly attentive to the political activities of Chinese abroad.

Is it a coincidence that these young people created this festival in 2018, the same year that censorship in China shifted from the government to the Party? This was an organizational change that resulted in much tighter control over the seventh art. 2018 was also the year in which movie star Fan Bingbing mysteriously disappeared. We would later learn that she had been arrested and placed under house arrest, officially for tax evasion. In fact, this was done to send a message to all the country's celebrities that no one should feel above the law. Fan has since been released, but no major director has dared to work with her again.

However, spectators at the opening of Allers-Retours in Paris on Friday, February 2, were surprised to see the star play the role of an airport security officer who is beaten by her husband in Green Night (2023), a hard-hitting film by a young director, Han Shuai, who had the wisdom to shoot in South Korea.

On Sunday, February 4, the organizers held a master class hosted by Wang Bing, a tremendous documentary filmmaker who, since 2022, has chosen to live in France. The program announced that this exchange would be preceded by a "surprise screening," which turned out to be Man in Black (2023), a documentary by Wang about the composer Wang Xilin, an octogenarian who tells the unvarnished story of the violence he suffered during the Cultural Revolution.

To not provoke the Chinese authorities, the organizers did not mention the film – which is obviously banned in China – in the program. Other feature-length films were only given a limited release in the Middle Kingdom, like This Woman (2023), a film that oscillates constantly between fiction and reality, in which young director Alan Zhang recounts the life of a young mother who accepts that she is less interested in her daughter than in her lovers, a story that is considered politically incorrect.

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