While droves of established filmmakers gathered at the Beijing International Film Festival, hundreds of up-and-coming young filmmakers and cinephiles rushed to an alternative film festival held from Aug 23-28 in Jiajiazhuang, a remote village in Fenyang city, North China's Shanxi province.

They were attending the 4th 86358 Short Film Festival at the village, the hometown of Chinese auteur and the festival's founder, Jia Zhangke.

With 1,032 entries into its major program, Chinese Language Shorts, 165 more than last year, the five-day event focused on exhibiting and promoting quality short Chinese language films and discovering promising young filmmakers.

During the festival, 16 short films made the cut and were screened along with 29 in three other programs – 10 in Special Screenings, 10 in Made in Shanxi, and eight in Focus on Hungary, a new category to showcase gems of the 2018 and 2019 Budapest Short Film Festivals.

Seven awards were presented at the closing ceremony.

Chinese Language Shorts handed out five awards – Best Film to Blessed Winter, Best Director to Liu Ziyang for Under the Full Moon, Best Screenplay to Lin Qiying for Secret Base, Best Cinematography to Wang Pengwei for A Young Tough, and the Jury Grand Prize to The Secret Child.

Two shorts, No Entry and Heading South shared the Post Wave Film Academy Award, which was named after the Post Wave Film Academy, an internet-based film education brand.

Love in the Air, an award-winning short directed by 20-year-old Kyle Hu that opened the festival, scooped the Committee Honor.

Deriving from a film culture salon, the annual event was initiated by Jia Zhangke in 2016 and has since been organized by the Jia Zhangke Art Center.

The name, 86358, a cluster of puzzling numbers, was inspired by China's Telephone Code Plan, with 86 as China's country code and 358 as the area code of Lyuliang, where Fenyang is located.

Although the festival is held in Fenyang, a small city in the hinterland, "We hope it can transcend space and celebrate diversity," said festival curator Xu Zhipeng, who said all entries had been produced after August 2019.

"To some degree, they represent the best Chinese language shorts made over the last year and mirror the undercurrents of our era," said Xu, adding pitching sessions will be included in future festivals so that young filmmakers are able to pitch their completed films or projects in development while striking connections with potential collaborators from the film industry.

"Short but pithy – that's what I think of short films," said Jia. "Because of the short form, they can be more flexible than features and can capture the pulse of the times in a swifter manner."

Jia himself made Visit, a four-minute film for a project commissioned by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in April. The work focuses on the quirks and sounds associated with human interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Short films can stand alone as a genre," Jia contends. "Shooting short films is not merely a path leading to feature-length films or an approach adopted by film academies to train students".

Brief in length, a short film is still a complete one.

"That means short film directors must work ingeniously, making the most of the limited length," Jia continued. "They have to deal with questions like, how to structure a short film, how to make transitions, and what to keep and what to leave out."

The budding festival attracts both acclaim and criticism.

"The participating works lack diversity as they are all drama shorts. But short film programs in many other film festivals usually include subsections focusing on other genres like animation, thriller, comedy and sci-fi," pointed out filmmaker Zhang Ming who headed this year's jury.

Besides the 86358 Short Film Festival, a number of smaller-scale film festivals, such as the China International New Media Short Film Festival, the FIRST International Film Festival and the Beijing University Student Film Festival are putting a spotlight on Chinese language shorts.