Torino Shadow

Official Selection, 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Imagine Zhao Tao, one of cinema’s most indelible muses, discovering film for the first time. Zhao plays a woman commuting between her young daughter in Taishan and her husband’s Chinese restaurant in Turin. As Zhao scooters aimlessly to kill some time, she notices the visual rhyming between both homes. Shadow puppets. Firemen. Each city’s many arches. In the middle of it all, she discovers a museum dedicated to film. Here, the everyday technologies of connection–babycam, video calls, short form dramas–fade into the backdrop when Zhao picks up her phone and begins to frame, to narrate, to film-make, distilling her presence through the lens for a beloved audience, her daughter.

Part ode to Jia’s favorite filmmakers, overseas Chinese workers, and to film lovers everywhere, TORINO SHADOW is Jia’s case for cinema as essentially human, necessarily collective, and deeply urgent exactly for these reasons.

– Christina Ree

Plays in

Jia Zhang-ke and Tsai Ming-liang in Europe

Presenting new mid-length works by two of Asia’s greatest filmmakers.