The Cinematheque

“Maddeningly ambitious … It wouldn’t come as a shock if any given scene were revealed to be a dream sequence; it’s a sign of serious poetic temperament that none of them are.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, A.V. Club

After completing his feature-length graduation film Tiger, Bi Gan took four years before he returned with his acclaimed international debut Kaili Blues. Key to his film—as an embedded reference and its original-language title—is Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, the basis for Tarkovsky’s Stalker. This poetic model of an almost existential, time-suspended search is counterbalanced by the reality of shooting, with barely any budget, in Bi’s hometown of Kaili. There, we are introduced to Chen Sheng, a poet, doctor, ex-con, and surrogate father to his nephew Weiwei. Weiwei disappears. The same could be said of most of the narrative links that would give us bearings in this rural Chinese village. Instead, Bi gives us sutras, visual and audio repetitions, and tone-setting moments that might drily parody or intoxicatingly mix high art and the everyday, all under an eternally overcast sky.

Best Emerging Director
Locarno International Film Festival 2015

In Mandarin with English subtitles

“One of the most precocious debuts of recent years … [Features] a 41-minute tracking shot that transforms the film into a waking dream, mingling past and present, scrambling cause and effect.” Dennis Lim, Artforum

“What makes the one-shot-sequence so exciting is not its continuity, but its découpage into a series of discrete scenes that are, says Bi Gan, as many ​‘planets’ with ​‘their climate, their water, their gravity, creating their own protagonists.’” Bérénice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema

preceded by

A Short Story
破碎太阳之心
China 2022
Bi Gan
15 min. DCP In Mandarin with English subtitles

A shapeshifting feline and ​“three weirdos” populate this fable, which was commissioned by a cat product company with no restrictions, save that a cat appear. Bi Gan’s manipulation of frame rate and scale is further developed in Resurrection.