Now in its 27th edition, the 2025 Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), which began June 13 and concludes June 22, includes over 400 movies across Shanghai, as well as five nearby cities including Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Suzhou.

The event will also host celebrations of the 130th anniversary of global cinema and the 120th anniversary of Chinese cinema.

To boost tourism consumption and give visitors a taste of everyday life in Shanghai, participating cinemas have teamed up with local cafés, restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions, offering everything from limited-edition coffee cups, discounted river cruises, art museum tickets, and even stamp-collecting challenges where audiences can exchange ticket stubs for film-related souvenirs.

A longtime fan favorite, the festival’s “Citizen’s Film Guide” screening schedule has been upgraded this year to a “Film Lifestyle Handbook,” offering travel tips and city guides explicitly tailored for attendees coming from outside Shanghai.

Several cinemas offer attendees nearby hotel discounts and luggage storage, while movie stubs can be exchanged for various discounts and goods.

“Such ‘ticket stub economies’ act like a chain, linking otherwise scattered cultural, tourism, transport, and commercial scenes, and turning one-time purchases into a chain of consumption,” Zhou Yongbo, a professor of tourism management at Soochow University, told state-run Xinhua News Agency.

In Putuo District, ticket stubs can be traded for free Suzhou Creek cruise passes or discounted art museum tickets. At Jiading Theater, a screening of “Flirting Scholar” — a 1993 classic starring Stephen Chow and Gong Li — comes with a free tour of the film’s original shooting location.

Victory Cinema, located near the filming site of SIFF’s opening film “She’s Got No Name,” directed by Peter Chan and starring Zhang Ziyi, has turned the vintage tram featured in the movie into an in-house café, where a movie ticket comes with a free coffee.

At Tianshan Cinema, stubs can be used to redeem set meals at nearby restaurants, many of which have extended opening hours past midnight to serve post-screening crowds. At Caoyang Cinema, stubs are exchanged for retro, 1970s-style tickets.

Manner Coffee is giving away limited-edition SIFF glass cups, while ride-hailing platform Didi is offering half-price coupons. Food delivery platforms Meituan and Dianping have launched a new “back-to-back screenings” fast food discount package.

This year’s SIFF also features three overnight “marathon” screenings, with runtimes ranging from six to nine hours. Lineups include a triple-bill of David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” “Lost Highway,” and “Mulholland Drive”; a full run of “Rebuild of Evangelion”; and Claude Lanzmann’s unsurpassed Holocaust documentary “Shoah.”

Official data reveals that over 600 screenings sold out within the first hour of tickets going on sale. About 73% of all screenings sold out within six days, setting a new record for the festival.

The festival concludes with the Golden Goblet Awards, featuring five competition categories: best feature-length film, new Asian talent, best documentary, best animation, and best short film.

This year’s shortlist includes 49 films from 28 countries and regions. Eleven of the 12 entries for best feature-length film are world premieres, while the remaining feature is an international premiere.

SIFF received over 3,900 submissions from 119 countries and regions — the most since the event’s founding — including more than 1,820 world premieres and over 520 international premieres, a record-breaking high.

The Golden Goblet jury consists of 21 members from 13 countries and regions, and is chaired by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore. Notably, the new Asian talent jury features a younger-than-usual lineup, with an average age of just 35.

The winners will be announced at the Golden Goblet Award Ceremony on June 21 at the Shanghai Grand Theatre.

(Header image: A poster for the 27th Shanghai International Film Festival on display at the Grand Theatre in Shanghai, June 18, 2025. VCG)