Qiu Jiongjiong's "Fuxi" Heads to Tokyo, With Food as the Thread

Qiu Jiongjiong's new film, Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting, is in the main competition at the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, and Parallax Films has taken on its international sales. Hollywood Reporter listed it as a world premiere in that competition, and Deadline reported Parallax's role in selling it abroad.

The film is an anthology, a set of separate stories linked by a common theme. Each of its four chapters is built around a feast, and together they span four millennia. Deadline says the stories are rooted in the folklore of China's Sichuan province. Lee Kang-sheng, the Taiwanese actor who has worked with directors across Asia for decades, plays several roles across the chapters.

Qiu is working in several jobs at once. Variety reports that he wrote, directed and edited the film, and also designed its production. It is his second feature. His first fiction feature, A New Old Play, won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno in 2021, and that film followed an actor who plays different figures across successive periods of Chinese history using stage techniques.

The project has been in development for some time. In March 2025, Variety reported that it was then titled Fuxi: Joy in Four Chapters and had been selected for the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, a market where filmmakers pitch projects to financiers. The production was later described as spanning Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to Variety. A film made with partners from several countries is called a co-production. Each partner typically brings money, locations or services, and shares in the film's credit and rights.

For the film's path to cinemas, the next steps sit with Parallax. An international sales company sells a film territory by territory, country by country, to local distributors who then decide when and how to release it. Which buyers sign up in the months after Tokyo will set the film's reach beyond the festival circuit. No release dates or buyers have been announced.

Tokyo is a showcase, and the competition section puts the film in front of festival programmers, critics and buyers at the same time.