This year’s festival of contemporary Chinese cinema focuses on the formal strategies and narrative means that a new generation of hip, young Chinese filmmakers is developing in response to the unprecedented pace of urban economic growth and social change in the world’s most populous nation. While their work focuses on a range of current social and economic concerns—from AIDS, unemployment, and divorce to housing dislocation and migration, immigration, and emigration—it is, above all, about love in the new urban setting. In a parallel component, the program provides a glimpse into new approaches at the venerable Beijing Film Academy, where the new leadership is preparing the filmmakers of the new millennium. Finally, we look back to the direction that talented members of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers—directors who began their work in the 1980s—have taken in their recent work.