Dea Kulumbegashvili on the Golden Goblet jury and the question cinema keeps asking itself

The cameras caught her in a white shirt and dark jacket, sitting beneath the SIFF branding that has been a fixture of the Shanghai International Film Festival since the 1990s. Dea Kulumbegashvili, a Georgian director working in a tradition that has punched above its weight for four decades, was in conversation with CGTN on 19 June 2026, three weeks into her role as a juror on the Golden Goblet main competition at the festival's 28th edition. "I'm emotionally connected to cinema," she told the state broadcaster. It was the kind of line that survives translation intact.

Kulumbegashvili is not a household name in the way that festival juries sometimes invite, and that is part of the point. The Golden Goblet panel, like the major prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice, is built around a mix of recognised masters and filmmakers whose work has earned the right to judge others. The Georgian's two features to date — the rural drama Beginning, which won the directing prize at San Sebastián in 2020, and April, which competed at Venice in 2024 — gave her a place in the conversation. Her presence in Shanghai gives Shanghai a place in hers.

A jury for a festival that has been recalibrating

The Shanghai International Film Festival has spent the last several years repositioning itself. The A-list festival accreditation it received from the FIAPF in 2001, alongside戛纳 and Berlin and Venice, made it the only such event in the Chinese mainland, and the only one of that tier outside Europe and North America for nearly two decades. Recent editions have leaned harder into the role — bigger industry markets, a more visible competition slate, and a jury programme that mixes European auteurs with Asian and Latin American filmmakers whose work travels through the festival circuit rather than through the major Western distributors.

Kulumbegashvili fits that brief. Her cinema is austere, observational, often shot in long takes and dealing with the small-town religious and civic life of post-Soviet Georgia. The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Georgia, and the Georgian National Film Center, have been the institutional sponsors behind that work — bodies that have built a national cinema of scale on a budget that would not register as a rounding error at a Hollywood studio. The point is not that Georgia has out-produced the United States. The point is that a country of roughly 3.7 million people has kept a feature pipeline alive and competitive.

In her CGTN interview, Kulumbegashvili was asked what she brings to the jury box. The answer, as paraphrased by the broadcaster, was an emphasis on emotional connection rather than technical criteria. That is a particular kind of artistic stance: one that treats cinema as a medium of feeling first and an industry second, and that has historically placed her at a remove from the festival-industrial complex even when she has operated inside it.

The festival's industrial substrate

The SIFF industry programme is the part of the week that does not make the headlines in the West. It runs a film market, a project lab, and the annual SIFF OR|S, a co-production platform that has helped shepherd films from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, the Chinese-speaking diasporas, and a widening list of Southeast Asian and Central Asian partners into the international festival network. The Golden Goblet sits on top of that machine, and juries are chosen with an eye to who can speak credibly about the kind of films the market is trying to move.

The Golden Goblet Award itself — 最佳影片, the main prize for best feature — has been contested since 2004, with a jury composition that has tracked the festival's diplomatic and commercial calculations as much as its artistic ones. Past juries have included Chinese directors, European festival veterans, and figures from Korean, Japanese and Iranian cinema. Kulumbegashvili's presence continues that pattern of mixing a Western festival circuit figure with the Asian and Chinese context the festival is built around.

Why a Georgian voice in Shanghai

There is a structural reason the choice reads as more than ceremonial. The festival circuit is consolidating around fewer, larger events, and the smaller national cinemas are being asked to do more with less. Georgia's case is instructive: a film infrastructure funded largely through the Georgian National Film Center, with co-production money flowing in from Eurimages, the Hubert Bals Fund, and a growing list of European public broadcasters. The films that come out of that arrangement — Kulumbegashvili's among them — have a particular texture. They are made under conditions of scarcity, and the choices visible on screen reflect that.

Her remarks to CGTN, brief as they were, gestured at that. Cinema as emotional connection rather than spectacle is also cinema made under constraint, where the tools available are fewer and the choices more legible. It is a stance that has obvious appeal in a Chinese context where the domestic industry has been pursuing scale and a parallel international conversation at the same time. Shanghai's Golden Goblet is one of the few places where those two trajectories cross.

Stakes

For Shanghai, the prize matters as a marker of cultural authority — a way of signalling to filmmakers, sales agents and national cinema bodies that the festival is a peer of the European majors, not a regional event. For a director like Kulumbegashvili, the jury box is a forum, but also a test: of how a filmmaker trained in a particular tradition weighs work from a very different one. The sources do not yet record which films the jury will see, or when a winner will be announced; the 28th edition of the festival is still in motion.

What is on the record is the line. "I'm emotionally connected to cinema," said Kulumbegashvili, in a city that has spent the last quarter-century deciding whether its festival can sit at the same table as Cannes, and a country whose filmmakers have spent the same period answering a similar question with much smaller budgets. The jury box is small. The conversation it is part of is not.

This piece was assembled from on-the-record remarks at SIFF's 28th edition and from institutional context on the festival and the filmmaker's national cinema. Where the available reporting is brief, the analysis leans on documented institutional history rather than speculation about jury deliberations.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/cgtnofficial/status/1234567890