About this event
FilmEphemera
浮浮游游
JIANG Shan
82 min
2026
Fiction
Mandarin
English Subtitles
In post-pandemic Shanghai, 23-year-old Asher, caught between her roots and life abroad, documents her final days in the city. When she impulsively asks Tori, her charismatic local dance teacher, on a coffee date, a spontaneous connection draws them into a night of wandering, play, and quiet intimacy. As they explore the city together, their growing bond blurs the line between fleeting encounter and something more lasting.
Director
JIANG Shan is a writer-director based in Los Angeles. Her debut feature Ephemera had its world premiere in the U.S. Narrative Competition at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Her previous feature screenplay Love, Elephant & Tourbillon won the Grand Prize at the 2024 BlueCat Screenplay Competition. Drawing from experiences between China and the United States, her films explore intimacy, displacement, and the instability of identity across cultures and genres. She inhabits familiar narrative tropes and bends them from within to allow new perspectives to emerge. She centers queer Asian subjectivity not as a symbol, but as lived experience. Shan’s upcoming projects expand her exploration of human intimacy in increasingly complex terrain, working toward a kind of cinema that remains urgent and alive in a rapidly shifting media landscape.